Want to speak another language? Learn from Europeans

Hi, I'm back in Vancouver and today I want to talk about how much the level of English

spoken by non-native speakers of English, how much that has improved and what that means for

the opportunities to learn other languages. What triggered this was watching the celebrations in

Budapest where they recently had an election and the supporters of the winning party were all,

giving interviews to the foreign media and as I have noticed in so many other countries,

the level of English spoken by these people, predominantly young people, is astounding in how good it

is. We have a chance to live a life where we are free, we have our rights, we have opportunities.

This is a win for freedom, for Europe, for democracy and it's amazing. And of course,

Hungarian is not a language that's similar to English in any way, other than that it uses the

latin alphabet. So why has the level of English improved so much everywhere? This takes me back to

sort of what I have always said about language learning. It's a function of motivation,

it's a function of the time you put in, divided by the amount of friction, difficulty,

inhibition, frustration that the language learning experiences. The big factors are motivation and

friction because if you're motivated and there's less friction, you will put in the time.

So what has happened in the last 20 years? I don't think is that the quality of language

instruction in schools has all of a sudden dramatically improved. I don't think it has changed at all.

What has changed is that the world has become a smaller place. People can have access through the

internet, through social media, to YouTube, Instagram, whatever it might be. People are surrounded by

language content in English. Let's just start with English. And so the opportunity to hear English,

to interact in English is much greater than it ever was before. So the world has become a smaller

place. That has strengthened the position of English as a lingua franca. And so some of the things

that influence that obviously, if we talk about friction, first of all, in terms of opportunity,

if you live in a country where foreign movies are dubbed, you have less opportunity. Typically

smaller countries, if I compare Portugal to Spain, if we look at Holland, Finland, countries with

smaller populations are less likely to dub the films, whereas larger countries, perhaps Spain or

Germany. I'm not sure about these situations, but where the films are dubbed in the local language,

they have less exposure to English. Another consideration is how similar is your language to the,

say, in this case, to English. And obviously Dutch people, Swedish people have an advantage.

But, you know, there's not that much difference between Dutch and German. And yet,

Dutch people are, by and large, on average, better speakers of English than German. So there are

other factors at play. We could argue that English shares 50% of its vocabulary with French,

and yet the English speakers, by and large, are not as good in learning languages as the Dutch

or other speakers, or even as good as the Portuguese. So another consideration is attitude.

So as long as English is perceived as the necessary language, the prestigious language,

the language of pop culture, then there's far more motivation on the part of people who don't

speak English to learn English. And there's less motivation on the part of English speakers to

learn other languages. So size of the country, dubbed or not, dubbed, similarity of the language,

all of these things can contribute. But by and large, it's a function of how motivated are you,

and if language content in other languages were more readily available, that would reduce

the friction, the resistance, and particularly too. And they kind of go hand in hand as people

are more motivated, they overcome the resistance. And if we look at lingua franca in the world

historically, there have been periods of time in history, where certain languages have been the

lingua franca over hundreds and hundreds of years, I think of Aramaic in the Middle East, the Persian

Empire, which was a lingua franca. For I don't know, six, seven, eight hundred years, we think of

Greek in that part of the world for a long period of time. We think of Latin, which was an

important lingua franca. But many of these, and even say Ketra in the case of the Andes,

or Arabic as Islam spread through much of what is today the Arabic world. In many cases,

these languages were imposed by the elites, religious elites, or educational elites,

or government elites. What's happening today is different. What's happening today is a ground

swell of interest, and an ability to access language content, or other kinds of functionality

on the internet that makes language learning easier, therefore less resistance. So what does

all of this mean for the future? Now, over the last 20 or 30 years, English has become more and

more dominant. There's no question that even in countries like Italy, or which we traditionally

don't think of as centers of language learning, the standards, the level of English has improved

dramatically. But what's going to happen going forward? So I think some of the same factors,

like motivation, like the ease of accessing content because the world has become a smaller place.

Other systems on the internet that help people learn characters, for example, in the case of

Chinese, all of these factors, which have increased the motivation, triggering, say, curiosity on the

part of people in the world to learn other languages other than English. Increasing availability,

for example, of, you know, anime for Japanese or K-pop, and I think it's not impossible that there

will be some kind of Chinese equivalent that all of a sudden becomes a source of fascination for

young people in the world. So it is not impossible that there will be increasing motivation,

perhaps more dispersed motivation to learn other languages. And it'll be easier to access content

in these languages. So I think some of these factors can also help to spread other languages.

A big part of language learning is a mindset. So if you live in Europe, it's simply considered

normal to speak English. It's just normal. It's nothing exceptional. I speak, you speak English.

Okay, big deal. Everyone's being English. It's not impossible in my mind that we could move to a

situation where it's normal to speak three languages. If it becomes that much easier to learn

more languages, easier to access content in these languages, it'll just be considered a normal

thing to do. There have been places in the world where historically people speak three, four

languages. I think of, you know, Singapore today or I think of apparently Ethiopia, although I

have no experience there, but some things which say if you live in the North American continent,

it's considered exceptional to speak another language. I think there are societies and times

in history where it was considered normal to speak different languages. Perhaps only amongst

an elite, but I think what I'm discovering now is that a lot of the things that the elites did

or imposed are now becoming commonplace because of a groundswell of interest and enthusiasm amongst

ordinary people. So while it is true that English seems to be more and more sort of established as

the lingua franca, the language that everybody wants to learn, and I think that trend will continue

and will strengthen not only amongst young people, but apparently according to statistics, even

middle-aged people are trying to learn English now because there are more and more opportunities to

learn and to use English. I personally think it's not impossible that some of these same factors will

contribute to more and more learning of other languages in general, which is a very positive thing

because it enables us to connect with other cultures and people who maybe think differently

than we do, and we learn about their cultures and their histories. And that's been my experience

in learning languages from Asia, from the Middle East, Central Asia. It's a wonderful thing to do,

and all it takes, as I said, is that motivation, which can come from anything, curiosity,

and ways to make it easier to do, less friction. And so there you have it. I'm an optimist when it

comes to how other languages will gradually create room for themselves alongside the spread

of English. Look forward to your comments. Thank you.