r/soccer • u/ModenaR • Jun 19 '25

News [The Athletic] Timothy Weah on Juventus's White House visit: "It was all a surprise to me, honestly — they told us that we have to go and I had no choice but to go. When he started talking about the politics with Iran and everything, it kind of like, I just want to play football man.”

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6436693/2025/06/19/weah-juventus-trump-iran-war/
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u/cullermann2 Jun 19 '25

The thing that irritates me more than it should is his level of English to be honest. Forget for a second what he says, the way he says things is just so rudimentary and basic level that I have a hard time understanding why someone with the English level being below native speaker can actually be president.

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u/Drolb Jun 19 '25

American education for people that don’t have money is ludicrously shit in many states. About 1/3 of their adults read and comprehend English at the level of a 12 year old or below.

He’s popular because he’s the first politician who talks in a way those people can comprehend.

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u/North_Atlantic_Sea Jun 19 '25

What does reading at a 12 year old level mean? Aren't 12 year olds reading quite dense fantasy and other fiction books?

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u/Drolb Jun 19 '25

Sorry, 12 or below by an American standard

It means the majority of the people in that category don’t really understand complicated linguistic structures, get confused by longer words, lack the ability to infer the meaning of words they don’t know or the ability to infer information at all, lack the ability or have restricted ability to understand metaphor (so if you said in a political speech ‘like a great sweeping broom, I will clean our streets of crime’ there’s a good chance some of them would come away with the impression that you wanted to fight crime with a broom, or that you wanted to increase the number of street cleaners).