Having done a little tour around a few different countries; I’ve been particularly impressed by the number of languages spoken by people who don’t speak English. A sandwich maker in Paris offered to take our order in English, Spanish or Swahili; French was of course the default; Swahili may have been a joke? I was impressed.
It is now one of my goals to develop my understanding of several languages. Why is it important to understand foreign languages?
- To communicate with people overseas.
- To communicate with people at home.
- To understand what people are saying when they think you don’t understand.
- To understand how the language works, so you can build better applications to handle it.
The last point is most important to me. I’d like to communicate with people who don’t speak English, but most people seem to have a better grasp of my language than I seem likely to accomplish! And the basics are easy to pick up.
But I would like to know the basics… for at least a good hand full… Let’s look at:
- Arabic [spoken by about 200 million people in Africa and Asia, it is also the language of the Qur’an]
- English [that’s what I try and speak, so it is natural to include it]
- Chinese [traditional and simplified scripts, Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations]
- Spanish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Japanese
- German
- Swahili
That will do it… covering the official languages of the UN, EU and African Union. I should be able to buy a beer anywhere that sells it… the difficulty will only be in finding it when they don’t.
English: Hello World
