
The Best Method to Master a Foreign Language, Guaranteed - curtis
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english-acquisition-and-best.html
======
pook
_Mind you, the Korean loves America. The Korean practically writes a love song
to America every chance he has. But there are certain things about
contemporary America drives the Korean crazy, and this is one of them: the
idea that the process of learning is somehow supposed to be fun. Just drop it.
Forget it. What is fun is the result of learning – the infinite amount of fun
when you finally put the finished product to use. And truly, that applies to
second language acquisition as well as anything else. Your horizon will expand
beyond the limit of your imagination. You will gain perspectives that you
couldn’t have even dreamed of. Don’t be a whiny bitch. Your sacrifice will be
worthwhile._

This should be shouted, at top volume, to everyone entering university. Great
advice.

~~~
jodrellblank
I suppose you learned everything you know about Emacs by rote memorization and
repetition of the manual, and absolutely no exploratory playfulness?

I suppose the gripe I have is not "wrong; humans can learn languages by
immersion!" but "why the societal crosslink between deliberate learning, and
not-fun?".

Is there no way to learn 30,000 words by any motivation other than fearing for
your life from a disappointed father?

The line blurs more when he says "Immersion doesn't work" then describes his
learning method which is ... (wait for it) ... completely submerging himself
in the language he is learning for hours and hours, reading it, writing it,
speaking it, paying attention to it - all in a country and in a school where
everyone spoke it ... immersing himself in it.

I cite: <http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/>

"""Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it
right) studying will help you speak a language better.

Most people don’t see the difference here. That one crucial word changes
absolutely everything you need to take into consideration.

If you already speak but your conjugations aren’t great or you need to quickly
increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means
study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to
pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way
to go.

But if you don’t speak the language confidently right now, then it’s time
someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this
confidence!"""

(But they are aiming at slightly different targets - Benny aims to be
conversationally fluent in 3 months, The Korean to gain college level mastery
in two years).

~~~
blickly
I think that when he says "Immersion doesn't work" he really means that
"Immersion alone doesn't work". Of course immersion is helpful, but it doesn't
produce results by itself (at least not in Korean; maybe a language with more
cognates with English would benefit more from immersion alone). Non-immersed
learners sometimes use the prospect of immersion as an excuse, along the lines
of "Once I'm immersed in the language, it will be much easier to really study
effectively, so it'll be a more efficient use of my time to take the studying
easier now."

I've made both of these mistakes myself (overestimating the value of immersion
and slacking off study when not immersed). When I first went to Korea, it was
a huge ego boost since it felt amazing to actually be using the language.
Because of this ego boost, I felt that "book-study" was suddenly beneath me
and stopped. After a few months of immersion, though, I realized I was
learning more slowly than just going through flash cards, so I picked them up
again. Even though immersion was useful for me, it was really only effective
as a compliment to other study.

------
ugh
I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do. I
dabbled along in school, getting a lot of Cs, being not really all that bad
but also not really all that great in my English classes. Then came the web.

The German speaking part of the web to me seemed utterly boring, nearly all of
the interesting stuff was happening on English websites. The cool thing was
that I could just read English, certainly with some difficulty at first, but
something I learned in school actually proved to be useful in the real world.
I read quite a lot on the web and suddenly something snapped. I never again
had to learn anything for my English classes again, no vocabulary, no grammar
and the As just kept rolling in. Writing essays, reading texts and discussing
them was fun. (I even managed to get a Cambridge Certificate in Advanced
English [1] – grade A – without any preparation on my part.)

It’s the strangest thing – I started to ‘feel’ English like I ‘feel’ German.
Constructing sentences with the right grammar turned from a painstaking
conscious process into something automatic and unconscious. That’s not
entirely a good thing, though. I cannot feel something I don’t care about and
I really don’t care about commas, which is why I suck at placing commas in
English as well as in German.

Besides commas there are also other problems with this method of learning.
Since I just stopped rote learning of vocabulary at some point and picked up
words as I read more and more on the web my vocabulary is extremely detailed
when it comes to some topics and lacking when it comes to other topics. It’s
basically badly deformed. Don’t try to talk with me about food or cooking. I
bet that only a few trips to supermarkets in English speaking countries could
correct that but I have regrettably never been to any such supermarket.

Now, three years after I left school, I also really fear for my ability to
speak English. In school we spoke English five days a week for at least thirty
minutes every day. I feel like preserving this ability is really hard.
Listening, conversely, is no problem. I watch tons of English stuff on the web
and at this point understand pretty much everything you could throw at me.

Ah, and I should maybe mention that writing comments here is my humble attempt
to preserve my writing abilities.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_in_Advanced_English>

~~~
js2
> I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do.

s/good/well/

<http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html>
<http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx>

:)

~~~
lelele
s/good/good/

Good is good enough. I understand what he means.

Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers
do.

~~~
alextp
Oddly enough I think some kinds of foreign learners end up _more_ worried
about some aspects of written english than native speakers. Things like
they're/there/their, affect/effect, it's/its etc are more likely to deceive
someone who learned english orally than someone who did it by the web/as a
second language.

At least, as a foreigner, it never ceases to amaze me that these things are
even issues at all.

~~~
ugh
Its and it’s is easy for me but seems to be a big problem for many native
speakers.

~~~
alextp
I think it might have something to do with translating. These "confusing" sets
of words are translated as completely different things in portuguese. On the
other hand, my high school teacher usually used "why" and "because" to explain
the difference between "porque" and "por que" in portuguese (and she could,
although she didn't, also use "the reason" as an analogy for "o porquê").

------
lmkg
The point of immersion is not that it's fun. The point of immersion is that
pre-puberty, it's still more effective to 'acquire' languages than 'learn'
them. The ability to intake languages organically from the environment
degrades as you get older, but it's widely believed that there's a qualitative
inflection point around age 13. Before that point, immersion is useful. Three
years of Spanish instructions gave me the skill to conjugate verbs on a test.
The following one year of light immersion[1] is what made me able to assemble
sentences in real-time, and think directly in Spanish without having to
mentally translate in and out of English.

If you're learning a language at age 16, like the author was, then yes, the
most effective way is to smash your face against the brick wall until it
crumbles. 10,000 hours, as they say.

What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional
languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional
languages later on. I'm trying to acquire Bulgarian, so I'll get to find out
on my own.

[1] During our one-hour-a-day class period, we were allowed to chat in class
if we did so in Spanish.

~~~
mirkules
English is not my native language, but my elementary school taught French
since 1st grade and English since 6th. I immigrated to the US at age 12, and
now speak both English and my native language fluently without an accent -- as
do my friends with a similar background as mine (the ones that immigrated
before 13).

I think it helps for kids to be exposed to many different languages early on.
For example, I never learned to speak French fluently, but because I have some
background in a latin-based language, I found it easier to learn Spanish.

It's much easier to relate existing words in your vocabulary with new foreign
words, than it is to memorize them outright. For example, it's probably easier
to learn Russian if you speak Czech already (and to speak it with less of an
accent) than it is to learn Korean if you're a Spanish speaker.

------
danh
My experience is pretty much the opposite.

I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and
watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize
anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.

I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on
spoken language.

I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts
of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional
idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom
bothers me.

Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak
(and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can
read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.

Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more
boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me -
being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.

And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I
had followed that route.

~~~
masterj
>Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak
(and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can
read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.

Spanish is likely an outlier here as it is spelled phonetically. French is
more difficult, but not terribly so. However languages that are written with a
different script, or in a completely different system like Chinese offer a
much larger hurdle. Chinese literacy, in particular, is orders of magnitude
harder.

~~~
redcap
I'll second that - in addition to my home university studies, I spent a year
on exchange in Japan where pretty much all I did was study kanji and vocab -
because we had at test on the 1942 kanji called necessary.

As it turns out I aced the test, and all that study is a big part of why I'm
comfortable with reading a newspaper. Still have to look things up from time
to time, but for the most part I know how to read the word even if I don't
know the exact meaning. In that sense, I agree with the blogger that rote
memorisation is key - and not just words, but often whole sentences as that
gives context.

As for Spanish, it's cognate in some areas with English, so that's at least
one part of why English natives are able to learn latin languages at a faster
click than other languages. The blogger will find it easier to learn Japanese.

------
btilly
For yet another data point, my brother has learned a number of languages. His
best language is Mandarin, which he started learning when he was 19. He
speaks, reads, and writes at a college level, with no discernible accent. He
has varying levels of fluency in a number of other languages including French,
Thai, Indonesian and Japanese.

His method of learning a new language is to just start out memorizing
vocabulary. He is able to achieve a sustained acquisition of about 100 new
words per day. Once he has sufficient vocabulary he adds in grammar practice,
sample conversations, etc.

~~~
natep
What does he consider "learning" a word? I'm genuinely curious, because it
seems like there are so many ways to do this, especially when you are already
comfortable with more than one language. Does he memorize the closest
translation in his native language? Use a picture? (and if so, does he use the
same set of pictures for each language?)

I doubt I could accomplish 100 words/day, but I may try his approach anyways.

~~~
btilly
I believe that when he starts he memorizes the words in another language.
After that he starts memorizing definitions involving other words in his
target language.

When he was learning Japanese I think he memorized the translations to
Mandarin rather than English, because those two languages were more similar.

------
curtis
I thought this part was interesting:

 _I also needed to be able to listen and speak. To develop speaking and
listening, I watched at least 3 hours of television every day. God bless the
closed caption, and the endless reruns of The Simpsons, Home Improvement and
Full House – I had the caption on, and mouthed the word exactly as they
sounded like. I said the difficult words over and over again until I got them
right. (It took years to get “girl” and “rhythm” right.) I got into the habit
of talking aloud to myself to make sure what my speech sounded right. (I still
do this often, which initially creeped out my fiancée.)_

~~~
angusgr
When I lived in Indonesia I met a housewife who told me she learned English
entirely through diligent application of this method, no formal language
education. She told me that I was one of only a few native English speakers
she'd spoken to about it (she was really shy about her English, I think the
only reason she spoke to me because I spoke fairly poor Indonesian in return!)

For my part, I would have happily believed that she spent 2-3 years living and
studying an English speaking country.

She might have been lying to me, but it didn't seem like it at the time. All
the information is there if you take the time to really study and memorise it.

~~~
curtis
I find it hard to believe that anybody could just accidentally pick up English
from TV, but maybe that's where the "diligent application" comes in. On a
related note, I think Indonesians might have an advantage over speakers of
many other Asian languages when it comes to learning English. The Indonesian
standard vocabulary has (IIRC) 10 or 12 thousand words borrowed from Dutch and
the language uses a Latin alphabet.

~~~
angusgr
Another advantage is that nearly everyone in Indonesia speaks at least two
languages, Indonesian being a second language to whatever local language is
spoken in your home region.

You're certainly correct about the alphabet though. In my experience, another
big challenge for Indonesian speakers of English is correct grammar - Malay-
style grammar is quite simple and usage conforms pretty well to its few rules.
Although that applies to most people learning English as a second language.

Indonesian has also picked up many new or specific terms from English. I got
in trouble with my history professor because I couldn't pronounce
"historiography" correctly as "historografi".

(EDIT: Ok, this one might via Dutch. Recently terminology pretty much always
come from English, though.)

~~~
curtis
It seemed from my brief exposure to Indonesian that it uses a very similar set
of phonemes to English, which might be another advantage. Not having actually
studied the language I can't say for sure.

------
tokenadult
I've learned a bunch of languages. Learning ANY language as second language
helps with acquiring the next language. Here are tips I put on the Web for
language learners:

<http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html>

(Hmm, it's about time to revise that webpage, but the advice is still good.)

------
Jun8
Excellent article! There's no "royal road" to learning a foreign language: (i)
You have to be willing to put the time to memorize and (ii) you have to be in
an immersive environment with some people who are willing to help you. To be
able to do (i), there mist be some large incentive for the outcome.

I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would be
the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance to
test this hypothesis

~~~
mpare
> I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would
> be the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance
> to test this hypothesis

They have an expression for this in French:

"La meilleure façon d'apprendre une langue est sur l'oreiller"

"The best way to learn a language is on the pillow"

I saw lots of other exchange students improve their French immensely when they
started dating a native. My experience was that having that sort of language
partner is nice because they're sympathetic to your mistakes and there's lots
of built-in incentive to have more interesting conversations.

~~~
jat850
I learned French almost entirely by helping raise my (now ex) girlfriend's 6
year old son. Best teacher I could have asked for, and he wasn't even trying
to teach me :)

She was also very helpful as she was a native French speaker, but fluent in
English.

------
melling
Shameless plug:

I wrote an Android app a few months ago to help learn/maintain Spanish.

<http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.h4labs.free.spanish_vocab>

I've been studying Spanish for several years, including 10 weeks in Guatemala.
It's easy to get rusty and I always need a refresher so I wrote this app.
Gonna add more grammar and hopefully turn it into a "real" app, including
versions for French(started), German, etc.

~~~
zaatar
Any chance you'd make iPhone apps out of these?

~~~
melling
I hope too. Just got my iPad yesterday, and I have an iPhone too. There's so
much I can do with the screen real estate on an iPad. Want to get my Android
to a Pro version first. Working on the verb conjugator now.

------
xiaoma
Of all the languages for an adult to learn, English is the _least_ impressive
I can think of. Here's why:

1) English language media can be found almost anywhere on earth. Many
countries not only have English movies, but also local English language radio
stations, newspapers and magazines specifically targeted at EFL learners. My
current home, Taiwan, has all of these. A modest number of those resources
exist for languages such as Mandarin, Spanish or French in various countries
around the world. Materials in Taiwanese Hokkien, on the other hand, are very,
very difficult to come by in most places.

2) No matter what kind of racial background you have, strangers in the US, UK
and other English speaking places will probably assume you speak English. Not
so for an American who moves to Korea, Sweden or Egypt.

3) Even when dealing with non-native speakers of English, it could very well
be your best language for communication. When non-German speaking Chinese and
non-Chinese speaking Germans do business, they'll likely use English.

4) English loan words are common in just about every major world language,
except French. However, French learners of English still have a lot of
cognates to help them out since English borrowed them from French.

5) In many parts of the world, English is a high-prestige language. This makes
it even more likely that locals will want to use it with outsiders. It also
makes it possible and even common for multi-decade expats to still be
virtually monolingual English speakers.

6) Many people, including the author of this article have been instructed in
English since childhood. However poor that instruction may be, it's still a
head start.

If he learns a lower-prestige language for which materials are hard to find,
I'll be impressed. Blackfoot and Navajo, for example, are both shrinking
language communities. Most of their speakers also speak English (and many
prefer to with outsiders). Here's an article about language learning from
someone who's had success in those circumstances:

[http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfiel...](http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfieldlanguagelearning/LevMAlnCnTYSIMLrnngYrLngg/contents.htm)

~~~
curtis
The point of the Korean's story is not that he learned English but rather how
well he learned it and how fast. He estimated that he learned 30,000 words in
2 and a half years, and if you followed the link to the phone interview, the
guy has no recognizable accent at all -- he sounds like he learned American
English as a child, even though he didn't start really learning the language
until he was 16. This is actually fairly remarkable.

~~~
xiaoma
First of all, that interview was after TWELVE years of living in the US,
completing high school, completing college and working in the target language
environment. Any highly motivated learner should have an excellent accent long
before that.

A serious language learner can get to a very high level of proficiency in a
couple years' full-time effort. Some of them have fun, too!

~~~
curtis
My sister-in-law's mom, who is originally from India, has lived in the U.S.
longer than I've been alive, and yet she still has a strong accent. I'm not an
expert, but in my experience it's extremely unusual for someone who learns a
second language later than about 10 or 12 to ever completely get rid of a
noticeable accent. Of course the first and second languages matter -- native
Japanese and French speakers who learn English later in life rarely seem to
loose their strong accents. Speakers of germanic languages seem to have it
easier.

It would certainly be interesting to hear a sample of the Korean's speech from
when he was 18 or 19. However, I think the reason he speaks English like he
grew up in the U.S. is because he put a lot of specific effort into getting
his pronunciation absolutely right.

 _A serious language learner can get to a very high level of proficiency in a
couple years' full-time effort. Some of them have fun, too!_

In general I agree with that. What the Korean did was clearly overkill for
what just about anybody would ever need to do. However, I think you could
employ the Korean's techniques to a lesser degree and still have fun learning
a second language.

------
angusgr
Although I don't disagree with anything specific in this article, there's an
uncontrolled variable here that seems pretty crucial:

\- The Korean was living in America (albeit a fairly Korean-influenced part of
America) when studying English, so there was an immersion factor (however
negligible) present.

\- Similarly, in the discussion of other languages The Korean learned in a
non-immersion environment, The Korean has only compared their results to other
non-immersion students.

Not saying that The Korean is wrong about anything, just that it seems like
they can be right, and concurrently immersion can also still be a valuable
tool when learning a foreign language.

------
rivo
I moved to Canada when I was 23 and left when I was 25. After those two years,
native English speakers frequently wouldn't believe that I was from Germany
and that I didn't grow up speaking English.

My take on becoming good at speaking a foreign language: You must make an
effort, it will not come to you passively. You must be willing to "forget"
what you already know. Listen to yourself. Ask other people to help and/or
correct you. Try to learn like a child. Play with the language. Be curious.

(On another note, I also realized that not having an accent got me into fewer
conversations since people would not bother asking me where I was from.)

------
tzs
Suppose you wanted to learn, say, French. I've occasionally wondered if you
could do it this way:

1\. Pretend that French is a dead language from an ancient culture. Obtain a
bunch of French books and study them, to try to notice patterns and infer
rules about the language.

2\. Do the same with some other language, such as Spanish.

3\. Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that
have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the
two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that
these manuals are your Rosetta Stone.

~~~
Hexstream
"Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have
the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two
"dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that
these manuals are your Rosetta Stone."

WARNING: I have repeatedly found the translations of houseware manuals to be
thoroughly broken. I often read the English part even though my native
language is French because English is, if not the original language, at least
well-supported. The French version has pathetic grammar and lacks many accents
and has some in wrong places, with bad grammar.

------
norswap
Same as many, I learned English mostly by reading the web and watching TV show
in English (with French subtitles, as I my mother tongue is French). So I
firmly reject the notion that learning a language has to be done trough rote
memorization.

Curiosity about words/idiomatic expressions you don't know is important tough.
But stopping on each single word you don't understand is certainly not the way
to go (well except if you have to, as in schoolwork).

------
Xurinos
I have been thinking that math is similar. Little substitutes for simply rote
memorizing your basic multiplication tables to be able to multiply. You can
remember the relationships between various concepts, and it helps to validate
and update your memory, but in the end, it is pattern matching. Rote
memorization helps you jump straight from A to B without needing the
translation step of C in between.

~~~
huherto
I can't find the reference. But some time ago there was a post in HN about how
different subjects require different strategies. It was written by a big shot
AI or Math professor. Probably someone from MIT. I can't quite remember.

~~~
fgf
I want to read that. Do tell if it comes back to you.

------
brown9-2
Somewhat tangential but: this blog and the author's writing is fascinating.
Where did you find it?

------
treblig
I believe the area of that graph with a "North" accent is significantly too
large. I can tell you that Cleveland, Ohio in no way has the typical "North"
accent.

------
Kilimanjaro
Somebody told me the best way to learn a foreign language is to date a native
speaker for three months or more.

No kidding.

------
jaekwon
i just got called a soft sack of shit.

------
javanix
Apparently his technique does not give one a particularly subtle grasp of
nuance when writing blog post titles.

------
jackfoxy
Yep, learning another language is hard work, but if you want an advantage,
find a sleeping dictionary.

------
ethan
tl;dr: flashcards, tv and books

------
mkramlich
On a related note I think the world should all switch to English as the
default standard language. So much less wasted effort, ink, paper,
miscommunication, cultural opacity, etc. We might lose some things, but I bet
it would be a net win.

~~~
aristus
I'm not sure if you are joking, but language is highly political. You could
say that language is the root of cultural, and thus national and ethnic,
identity.

Language domination tends to follow political, trade, and economic domination.
The "lingua franca" of Europe used to be, as the phrase implies, French.
Before that was bastard Latin, after that it was German. More people speak
Spanish than English in the New World, and Brazillian is a close third.

The problem with suggesting a default language is that you are also implying
worldwide domination. It's not usually a welcome idea. :)

There is a joke about that: air traffic control frequencies are shared, for
obvious reasons. Once a Lufthansa flight was coming into Berlin. The pilot
asked for clearance in German. The tower responded that he must use English,
as that is the rule. The pilot responded: "Why? I am a German, flying a German
plane to a German airport. Why must I speak English?" Another pilot cut in--
"because you lost the bloody war!"

This is actually true; if you don't trust the pilots of a former enemy, a good
way to keep tabs on them is to make them use your language on the radio. QED.

~~~
ellyagg
I very much doubt he's joking. It's actually subtly insulting that you think
he is. Marilyn vos Savant, for one, agrees with that idea. Not that she has
any credentials other than being smart, but there's really no better
credential than that for weighing in on this topic, as it's not a matter of
expertise but one's assumptions about what's important. Like her, I favor the
gradual unforced adoption of a single global language, and English seems the
best bet at this point. I think what we lose in diversity we more than gain in
standardization.

Perhaps more controversially, I happen to think English is objectively the
best[1] natural language currently available for this role. It's got by far
the biggest vocabulary and is by implication the most expressive. Ayn Rand's
native language was Russian, she was fluent in several other languages, and
she wrote that English gave her the most freedom and power of expression.

[1] Assuming we can agree that a concept such as "best" can exist and we don't
degenerate into nihilistic pseudo-philosophical examinations of first
principles.

~~~
aristus
Well, that wasn't what I intended. I am truly unsure the original intent.

English is pretty good, I agree, though phrasal verbs are the work of the
devil. It has a head start in aviation, mathematics, engineering, some
television, finance, and computer science. The British did a good job of
seeding it everywhere and WWII gave it a large boost. Then again, the
dissolution of the empires in the 60s made English and French _less_
fashionable in many areas of the world as nationalism took hold.

Favoring "gradual unforced adoption" is a fine thing. I suppose I favor it
too, as a "lingua franca" but not as a single global language. Knowledge of
history does, I'm sorry to disagree with you here, qualify one to have a
credentialed opinion. Language hegemony has _never_ happened without a lot of
people getting killed. I do not favor that, and I trust you don't either.
Maybe this time will be different, who knows? America has always had
wonderful, astonishing optimism.

But keep in mind that what you are proposing is no less than closing the book
on many venerable, vibrant, and (ahem) more populous cultures. They will push
back as much as you would push back on being told that English was obsolete.

~~~
mkramlich
I never said _how_ or _when_ it should happen. Just that it should. (Would be
great if it happens peacefully and gradually and with some effort to not hurt
other folks feelings.) I also never said I think English is the "best". I only
think it's the path of least resistance. Of all the languages that are serious
candidates, most reasonable people would agree it's already the closest thing
we have to a global standard language, especially in science, business and
programming. Also, you can have and preserve culture even when a people's
default language changes. I also would argue that there is nothing inherently
special in "culture" which is distinct from it's component elements -- much of
it is random and arbitrary and due to different choices and evolutionary paths
caused by geographic, racial and tribal/breeding differences. I'd argue that
much of what we now consider to be national culture will blur together and
fade away over a long enough period of time. And the pace has likely
accelerated due to modern travel and communication technology (eg. jet
airliners and the Internet). I also think it would be a net-win eventually if
all nations merged together into a single nation -- among other things, it
would eliminate or at least drastically reduce the need or justification for
large standing armies and the military-industrial complex. US wouldn't need to
make another country a boogeyman (USSR/China/Iraq/Iran/etc.) and vice versa.
What would have become a military/espionage situation in a multi-nation world
become perhaps at most a legislative or law enforcement action.

Just thinking outside the box. Long term.

~~~
aristus
Fair enough. I hope that everyone learns English too. But I also hope that if
it does happen, it does not happen at gunpoint or to the exclusion of other
languages, cultures, literary and oral legacies. That is what happened when
Old English was merged at swordpoint with Norman French to produce the
language we're using now.

I happen to disagree that "culture" is a null word or that it can be
translated fully. Virtually all multilingual people I know think the same way.
It's ok to disagree with, but not dismiss, that opinion.

Where one stands depends largely on where one sits. Would you be willing to
give up English --completely, not even teaching it to your children-- for
Spanish or Chinese?

------
c00p3r
"The practice makes a man perfect".

~~~
motxilo
"The PERFECT practice makes a man perfect".

