Anglosphere countries are just bloody awful at learning languages in general. It's a mix of our education systems just not taking it seriously and a certain arrogance that comes from having the world's lingua franca. There aren't many places you can go in the world speaking just English and not be able to get around.

The UK gets the most stick here because it's in Europe and large and football pundits saying Santi Choritzo is a running joke at this point, but the Irish aren't any better at it than the English are. Most of them can't even hold a conversation in Irish. Ditto Canadians, French is an official language there and many Anglo-Canadians I've met are almost proud they can't speak French. I'm originally from the States and foreign language teaching there is a joke. The only Aussies I know who speak a second language are the children of immigrants. It goes on and on.

The only anglophone groups I know of that are reasonably good at a second language are people who grew up in anglophone countries but were a minority. So Anglos in Montreal, where most people speak French, tend to be pretty good at French and English South Africans, because most white people there speak Afrikaans as a first language and the apartheid government was essentially Afrikaner nationalists and instituted extensive bilingual education. So most white South Africans I know speak it, even if they aren't ethnically Afrikaner.