Re: O.T. On learning English Message #3 Posted by Juan J on 1 May 2008, 9:55 a.m., in response to message #1 by Palmer O. Hanson, Jr.
Hello,
Nowadays English is the lingua franca of the world. True, there are more than one billion Chinese speakers and over five hundred Spanish speakers, to mention just a couple languages, but chances are English will be the language of choice to communicate with them.
It is often argued that the sheer number of speakers is proof of a language's importance, but this argument overlooks the distribution of that language. English Speakers can be found from Scandinavia to Tierra del Fuego, whereas Chinese or Spanish speakers are harder to find. There is a good chance that English will help you communicate anywhere on Earth, and a good chance that other languages will not.
On the other hand, each language is a unique mixture of different sources, which makes it interesting. From Russian's declensions that minimize the need for articles to English's irregular verbs to Chinese's rules for writing characters and counting, there is a lot of features that make it interesting to learn a given language.
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