I’m not really concerned about it myself, I’m already well beyond the point it would be terribly relevant to me. I would very much disagree re: education levels, though. I’ve worked with plenty of people from various countries, and those with less education often cannot switch to a more widely understood way of speaking, in my experience. Partly, it comes down to limited vocabulary, resulting in them being unable to provide alternative ways of saying things that might be more widely understood, and partly down to an ignorance as to what elements of their speech aren’t widely used or understood outside of where they grew up.

I would still argue that a neutral Spanish is no more real a variant than BBC English or “General American” accents and mannerisms used by news presenters represent actual variants of English, though. It might serve as a crutch for intelligibility in cases of extremely heavy accents, but most cases where you might employ it are situations where you already wouldn’t be expected to employ much in the way of slang. In regular interactions, though, people mostly just speak to each other in their natural accent, and if somebody busts out a local term that isn’t understood, the other person asks “¿Qué quiere decir huachicolero?” gets an explanation, and the conversation moves on, same as it does in English.

At the end of the day, I think pursuing a neutral manner of speaking from the beginning is something of a fool’s errand for most language learners. Like it or not, you will wind up speaking like the native speakers you interact with most. I don’t particularly use Dominican vocabulary, but people still assume I’m from DR when I speak Spanish, because when Spanish became my primary working language for 5 years after getting out of the beginner stages, that’s who I was surrounded by at work. Absent very specific goals (I knew a guy who focused exclusively on Rioplatense Spanish, as he was moving to Argentina in a couple of years to study in Buenos Aires), I think most people would be better served focusing on the fundamentals, reading widely, consuming a wide range of media and actually speaking with people, rather than endlessly agonizing over perfecting the process before actually getting to the point they can actually use the language.

After years of regular use, I can speak it fine and modify how I speak appropriately, as the situation calls for. If it’s sufficient for the RAE folks working on the DELE and the staff at my local Instituto Cervantes to not remark on anything beyond occasionally flubbing the gender of a word, I’m not too worried about the neutrality of my Spanish.

And the Lamy ballpoints can finally have a decent ink, now that they’re making them with the Jetstream ink. Pretty sure it’s a Japan exclusive for the moment, though.

Neutral Spanish isn’t a separate variant, so much as a separate register of the language, though. It’s really just a thing I hear native speakers say when they don’t realize that educated speakers from their country do, in fact, still have an accent, but it’s more just down to vocabulary choice, rather than some major change elsewhere. Like, an educated Dominican isn’t going to call a bus a guagua and they’ll probably enunciate more clearly than they would in casual conversation, but they’re not suddenly going to start using vosotros and distinción when they speak.

Whenever I hear a native speaker talking about Neutral Spanish, it’s invariably followed by why I should try to speak like people from their home country, and that people from elsewhere don’t really speak proper Spanish. It also tends to correlate pretty well with people telling me, “Yo hablo castellano, y por eso no puedo entender lo que dicen las personas plebes, ya que hablan español.” for a nice dose of Latin American classism.

If you learn something too region specific, usually doesn’t.

My experience has been more that learners tend to not realize that certain things they pick up aren’t universal, and/or that they’re only acceptable in certain contexts, and then unwittingly pepper their speech with words and phrases from one country that are unknown/unacceptable in another, or use very informal/vulgar language in formal settings. Like, if I curse around my wife the way I would curse around my Mexican coworkers, she’s scandalized by how vulgar the profanity is, and if I told my Mexican coworkers I had a fuinfuán in my backyard growing up, rather than a columpio, there’s nearly 100% chance they’re not going to have any idea what the hell I’m talking about.

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Depending on where you draw the line, Lamy might no longer count as a European brand, since they were recently bought out by Mitsubishi Pencils.

That aside, you’ve still got Pelikan, who do make some entry level fountain pens.

It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.

In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.

It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.

And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.