Varies of Language
Today we have a lot of different language in the world. Some have a number of speakers like Chinese which is used by more than 1,500,000,000 people, and some have not much speakers like Dhivehi which is used by 300,000 out of 410,000 Maldivians. In the Ted Talk 4 Reasons to Learn a New Language, the speaker John McWhorter mentioned some importances of having and learning different languages.
One reason he brought up is that different languages let people speaks them have different ways of thinking. Like French speakers somehow, in their language, assume a table can speak, which is not possible in Chinese or English unless it’s in children’s books. Besides that, there are some other reasons. Learning different languages is the only way for you to fit in that culture. Language is the code of that culture. Also, it’s likely to say that a multi-language speaker is probably a better multitasker as well. Another good reason is that learning different is fun. I am more like a math and science person but for some reasons I would love to learn a third language like Japanese or Korean.
But I’m a little disagree with a detail in his speech that English is more likely to be the “world’s universal language”. It’s true that English is more commonly used than other languages but the first reason for my statement is pretty simple, Chinese is the language spoken by the greatest amount of people. And not only in China, some nearby countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore speak Chinese as well. The factor that there are more people choose to learn English as their second language is, according to what I experienced, most people from western countries, when I say western countries mostly I mean America, they are more likely to not be interested in a total unfamiliar culture than people from eastern countries. Here is a really common example that we Chinese people all knows who Donald Trump is and a lot of Americans do not know Jinping Xi is the leader of China now. And China is one of the biggest economies of the world nowadays, not some random country.
