The Tower of Babel is one of my favorite ancient stories because of its emphasis on language. The point of the story has stood the test of time, both no matter if the meaning is taken literally or metaphorically. If we can properly talk to each other, we can achieve the highest of human feasts. When we don’t, we get people believing the world is flat.
A Universal Language stands at the base for our shared future, and I hope that it will be English. I’m myself not a native-speaker, and had to learn it over the years. During that time, I’ve often reflected on a language that has always had my attention.
Sometime in my teens, I started to consume content in English. I was watching a lot of TV-Shows, and thought of throwing on English subtitles. That evolved into watching the whole thing in English, with no subtitles. I started to follow YouTubers, Twitter profiles and Instagram-personalities in English. The content was what you would expect from a 15 year-old and not very valuable, but I picked up the language.
When I picked up reading again, I did so in English – I had gotten used to consuming information in it (I make an exception for those works that are originally written in either German, Spanish, or Catalan – or if someone puts a book in these languages in my hand). English friends of my parents, a bilingual brain from a young age, and the luck of traveling often, helped me get ahead with the language. I am not an expert by any extent: I lack vocabulary, make grammatical mistakes, have an accent, and can only wish I had the eloquence many people I look up to have. But I did get to a level where I don’t have to worry about the language in either professional or personal settings.
It has also become my default language. At some point in my early twenties, I started thinking in English. My journals, my Google searches, my software, my cynical self-commentary; English. That never happened by intent, but the benefits have been compounding for so long that it got to a point where it felt natural.
All this will not be very relevant for you, but it provides a context for the conclusions I reached about the language. Today I’m writing down the main reflections.
It’s easy
Yes. I know. There are like 7 different ways of pronouncing ‘ough’ in a word, and prepositions make little sense. Phrasal and irregular verbs require practice. And yes, it’s the easiest language to find training material and situations to practice. We’re surrounded by English, which obviously helps in the learning process.
But! There’s no gendered nouns, which are a nightmare for anyone trying to learn languages like Spanish or Russian. Verb conjugation is a piece of cake, specially compared to languages like Arabic or Hungarian. The plurals are easily formed. And you know when you see texts in other languages that are full of weird symbols on letters? Those add a lot of room for orthography and phonetic confusion – č,ó,ä, ø, ç, ů are just some examples.
But the main reason is that the structure of sentences makes sense, it’s very intuitive. It usually follows a simple Subject-Verb-Object order, nouns do not change form depending on what role they have (some pronouns do, but those are easy-to-learn exceptions), and helping verbs make life a lot easier.
Beware – that it’s easy is actually a good thing! Someone once introduced the notion that the more difficult the language, the more merit to its speakers. And what’s worse, people seem to believe that. Guys, if your language is easy to learn, it’s accomplishing exactly what it intends to: facilitate communication. So saying that English is easy is not an insult to native speakers, it’s a both a compliment and a ‘thank you’.
It’s (basically) essential for business success
For any professional in a non-English speaking country, English is the n. 1 skill to learn. Period. I’ve seen uncountable professionals who are not getting the deserved (and desired) career jump because they lack good English communication skills. Be it getting a promotion, into a better company or past first-round interviews.
Languages like German and Spanish have always helped me get a foot into the door, and I’m happy that I speak them. But once I was in, English has always helped me expand my influence and competences – I got into exciting projects, promotions, and a voice in meetings.
The ability to communicate well in the language is critical for anyone wanting to succeed in business. And if you want to work in interesting roles, you have to understand that they will mostly be in companies that use English.
Yes, there are good options by speaking the local language. But, 1.) you’re going to have greater competition, and 2.) you’ll always have the option to go for these job anyway, even if you speak good English. And from what I’ve seen, the pay will be higher too. English broadens the scope of the options you have, exponentially.
The real value of English lays it the minds you get access to.
There’s a couple of ways English facilitates your access to information. The first is that, nowadays, most is done in English anyway. The influential communicate in English, either because they live in the US or UK, or because they want to reach a wide audience. International conventions are held in English, so are sports events. Most scientific studies are written in it.
If someone has something important to say to the world, he will eventually have to do so in English.
The second way is by translation. For those bodies of work that are not originally English, the odds are that you will find the translation in English rather than any other language. Most works exist only in the original language. For German, it’s estimated that only 8%-10% of published books are translated into another language. For Arabic works, I can only guess that number is even lower. There are huge bodies of work from Asian literature that we don’t have access to. And that’s fine, we don’t need access to everything, we wouldn’t have time to even start to go through it.
Say you learn Dutch instead of English. Congratulations, you now get access to a big amount of original Dutch minds, and I’m sure there’s many of them, that have not been translated into other languages. You can do the same with any other language, and it’s a beautiful journey that will give you many rewards. I met a guy whose father learned Russian just so he could read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in their original version; enviable. Still, the access you get is limited compared to the amount of possible reads, podcasts, poems, films or any other format out there except french fries recipes.
But English is different, because you get the biggest body of original work in any language, and you get the most amount of well-translated works from other languages. The only languages that might compete are Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic. As a Bilingual Spanish speaker, I still feel English has a significant edge over the language. Mandarin is probably more important in certain Asian regions. The contributions of Arabic-speaking scholars made during many centuries is huge, and it bugs me not to be able to read it. Still, I believe that , specially nowadays, English has an edge when it comes to works available in the language.
Do you really know a language if you can’t joke in it?
There are differences between people that have learned English from books, and those that learned it by travelling. Or by binging movies, or by working, or by watching porn (or it’s modern equivalent: political debates). Your ability to understand others and the type of connections you make will be different.
Whatever your native language is, you learn it from all different perspectives and angles. In academic, informal and professional levels. At school, it’s used to read science, philosophy, or novels. You talk to people from all ages and paths of life. So, naturally, you will have the ability to navigate many situations. In a foreign language, on the other hand, you have to discover these situations first, altering your ability to communicate depending on the scenario.
I found that a good measure to measure your foreign language skill by is banter. If you’re able to have a lighthearted and fun conversation with natives, in which you make other people laugh (or at least entertain), you’re doing well. Making connections with people is the essence of communication, so piers having fun with you is a solid base. From there, it should be easy to get business-fluent and understand more complex literature if you’re not at that level.
That opinion is a bit biased, as humor is my go-to when trying to establish connections. Others might choose other ways, and that’s fine. The principle stands: if you want to become a good speaker, the first thing to learn in a new language is the ability to connect with people the way you do in your native tongue. From there you expand on your capacity. People often fall into the trap of wanting to learn vocabulary or ways of talking they would never use in their native tongue.
Some notes
First, language is frequently said to be a window into the culture of a country. Partly right, but it’s not everything. It goes a long way to be able to communicate with people in their native tongue. But pretending you understand a society just because you can laugh about memes or watch some original movies is stupid.
Second, even if I’m a big fan of English and advocate for everyone to learn it, I find it equally important, if not more, to maintain regional languages alive. My favorite language is a dialect spoken by less than 600,000 people. I feel like a language disappearing is humanity loosing a part of its soul. Just because we learn to communicate globally, doesn’t mean we should stop being who we are.
leo burghaus 
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