I live in Europe, where the most widespread language is English. I’ve been to several capitals now where public workers, like health workers, cops or goverment officials, don’t know any English.
In my opinion, if you are going into a line of work in a CAPITAL, which requires communication, you have a duty to learn the language people from all countries, not just your own, are likely to speak.
I might be biased, because languages have never troubled me to learn.
But why don’t people who are likely to deal with english speaking foreigners bother to learn basic english?
They probably know German. In parts of Europe the “main” international language is german. I got by with my basic German when traveling through Eastern Europe.
I would like to add that in China, Japan and most Eastern countries use the Latin Alphabet to romanize the pronunciation of Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian etc… languages. English pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet is used.
One reasons why English is used so widespread around the world is because the world leading hegemon is the United States whose official language is English.
Colonialism. The US and most English speaking countries were former colonies. Then the rest of the world had to agree on some common language and it became English. For most purposes. Mandarin would maybe have made more sense if you disregard the colonial period.
There are more Mandarin speakers who read/write Chinese as a first language than there are English speakers as a first language. However, there are a lot more English as a second language speakers than there are Mandarin speakers as a second language
No I can’t. If I want to live in the EU then I need a golden visa for Spain which costs £500k. If not then I can spend a maximum of 90 out of 180 days in any country. That is 3 months on then not permitted to go anywhere in the EU for another 3 months.
