This take is geared at all those people learning English as a second language right now, my advice is: learn another language. The world has 7,000+ living languages, and yet 99% of the earths population is learning one of them, why? This doesn't make sense to me, and as I do more research, and travel more internationally I realize that so many people are wasting their time, and they would be better off learning another language. English isn't that great at all, there are so many better languages to spend your time on.
1: English isn't spoken by that many native speakers.
English has an estimated 350 million native speakers, almost all of whom live in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. Compare that to Mandarin Chinese which has 3 times more speakers, who are immigrating all over the world, or Spanish which was around 400 million. Chinese isn't an official language in many countries, but I guarentee you see more Chinese people in many places then native English speakers.
2: You dont see many native English speakers.
I spent 2 years living in Japan, and I talked to hundreds of Japanese people in my time there, and almost all of them would tell me "You are the first English speaker I have ever met" which begs the question, why are they learning English? In Japan English is mandatory in school, but why learn such a useless language? When I was meeting 25/30 year old people that had never met a native English speaker I would wonder, why is the government wasting their time? In Japan I saw hundreds of Chinese people, and many Koreans as well, why not have the Japanese learn Chinese or Korean? The nearest English speaking country was 4,000 miles away, China and Korea were merely a few hundred miles away. Chinese and Korean would be so much more useful to your typical Japanese person, than English, the language of a country 4,000 miles away.
3: English is freaking hard.
Believe me, I taught the language for 2 years, I've seen all the struggles a learner can have. The spelling is a nightmare, words like "ocean" and "right" are spelled so weird, and pronounciation is so impossible that you will never master it. That means no matter how good your English gets, we can still tell if you dont speak it natively. In Japan and Korea I had dozens of people try to convince me they were American born Japanese/Koreans because they had "good" English, but I could still tell from slight pronounciation mistakes that they werent. I had one guy who moved to the US when he was 5 and lived there from the time he was 5 until he was 19, before moving back to South Korea, his English was better then most, but after he told me he was born in the US I knew he was bsing me, he mispronounced one word and I knew he was born in Korea, just from one pronounciation mistake. On top of that the grammar is certainly very difficult to understand, especially past perfect, future perfect, etc. English is like a hybrid language between German and French, which means that a lot of the rules we follow in English aren't from a single language family, but from multiple and the list of exceptions, especially compared to other languages, is ridiculous.
4: Your hard work really isn't that impressive.
You might spend hours and hours learning English but you won't impress many native speakers. Its so common for us to meet someone that speaks English that we've stopped being impressed. In China, for instance, when I was visiting, from time to time I would have kids come up to me and start talking to me in English(because I am white and they assume all white people speak English), the first few times I thought it was cute and praised them for their English, but it kept happening and I kept having people come up and try practicing English with me to the point that it got annoying. I humored the kids, but every bloody Chinese person knows a little bit of English so when they come say a few words to me I really dont care any more, because a thousand other Chinese people did the same thing, I stopped being impressed when everyone spoke English to me, it just became expected that someone would try speaking in English to me. This unimpressive nature of learning English was clearly evidenced when I was in college, one of my best friends was Japanese and he was bilingual in English and Japanese. I was studying Japanese in college and got so many more job opportunities. I had several job offers that didn't even relate to Japan, they just offered me the job because the employers thought it was cool I knew Japanese. My friend was so confused by this, he was like "Why do they hire you, when I speak Japanese and English too". His English was probably better then my Japanese too, but I got all kinds of attention and he didn't get any. Why? Well as I said, every Japanese person can "speak" English, so when you put it on a resume no one cares, especially when you are applying for a job in the US and they expect it, but not every English speaker can speak Japanese. In fact, I've only met a handful of English speakers who I would say could actually hold a conversation in Japanese, compared to Japanese who can speak English, I've met hundreds, so when I, an English speaker, learn Japanese its really cool and unique. If I met a Japanese person who could speak Russian, for instance, I would think that is really cool because I've never met a Japanese person that can speak Russian, however English speaking Japanese are a dime a dozen so I dont really care enough.
5: There are so many more interesting languages out there from countries that are emerging into the world stage.
The English speaking countries(particularly Australia, the UK, New Zealand, and Ireland), are losing prominence in the world. In 35 years only 1 English speaking majority country will be in the top 10 largest economies in the world, and the populations of these countries are projected to drop, so for the long term English is looking to decline, while other languages like Chinese, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, are looking to increase in importance because of the projected GDP growth of their countries. If you are looking for the future, English isn't the way to go.
I have met a lot of people in my travels overseas, and I have heard a lot of annoying people pushing English as the universal language. I say **** those people, most of them aren't even native English speakers, English is not and should not be a universal language. In college I had a prick from Singapore who was hanging out with me and my Japanese friends, we started speaking in Japanese and he told us to speak English as it is the "universal language", I told him basically to **** off. I was the only white native English speaker in the area and I was completely okay with speaking Japanese, meanwhile this prick didn't understand so he got all pissed off and tried to get us to speak English. I told him not to hang out with Japanese people if he wasn't prepared to speak Japanese, that shut him up. Its people like that who piss me off so much, I am completely okay with other languages being spoken, I think that language is a beautiful thing and it pisses me off when I see everyone on earth learning one language(English). English isn't that great, if we want a universal language why not learn Esperanto? Its easy, makes sense, and no one speaks it natively so they can't make fun of you for speaking it wrong. The ONLY reason you should learn English is if you plan on living long term in an English speaking country, but seeing as English speaking countries aren't that great anyway, I dont really see the need. Learn another language, there are 7000 of them out there, all with their own unique history, culture, and story attached to them.
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