This is unsurprising considering the historical importance of count-based models in which every surface form of a word is a separately modeled entity (English cat and Spanish gato would not likely benefit from sharing counts).
recent models that use distributed representations-in particular models that share representations across languages (Hermann and Blunsom, 2014;Faruqui and Dyer, 2014;Huang et al., 2015;Lu et al., 2015, inter alia)-suggest universal models applicable to multiple languages are a possibility.