Foreign Perspectives

Sometimes I wonder whether or not it’s worthwhile even attempting to learn another language if you’re a native English speaker.

After all, around Europe it’s commonplace to find that companies choose their working language as English. That doesn’t mean that they suddenly revert to some other language when chatting over lunch: it’s English all of the time in many of these companies.

In the European administration there is little option but to choose English as it’s the one language that can be counted on to be known by everyone as, outside the UK and Ireland, it’s almost always the first second language that people learn.

So in many cases you can get away with only English.

The other problem though is that as a native speaker of English it’s often difficult to get the chance to try out any other languages that you speak as throughout the world people tend to go to English straight away unless you speak their language at a very proficient level. That, of course, means that many English speakers just give up.