I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Apparently, being able to tell the difference between laundry detergent and fabric softener. Had multiple asian-native room mates in college that made that mistake. They were all pretty fluent so I don’t think it was a language barrier issue, but to be fair, Big Laundry doesn’t exactly make it easy to tell what’s what on first glance.
English is my first language, but labels on laundry detergent are complete ass. And it seems to be an across the board thing for whatever reason. 90 % of them don’t say what it’s for on them, just various synonyms for clean, and scent or no scent. The other 10% say “detergent” or something vague in SUPER small text. I just Googled laundry detergent and the results were exactly as I just described. Like shit hopefully this jug of nondescript liquid makes my clothes clean lol.
Asian here, my home is addicted to all scented products including laundry with generous amounts of fabric softener. The river water is so hard it’s a necessity in any case, but we love everything having a good smell. In fact, the nearest market sells more scenting products than cleaning products if you can believe it.
the Big Laundry conspiracy runs deeper, fabric softener ruins some fabrics, and degrades most others