I remember going out to dinner after a seminar one time when I was in London. Maybe 10 people. It blew me a away, was back and forth in at least six languages. English, French, German, another Euro language that I think was Dutch (since one of speakers was Dutch), Hindi or another South Asian language, and some variant(s) on Chinese. I was the only person at the table not fluent in at least 2-3 languages.

Fortunately, I could claim my ignorance was about the subject matter (since 90% the seminar, which had been in English only, went over my head, too).

I don't care that English is spoken around the world. That didn't prevent the British empire from falling, and it won't prevent the economic decline of America. IMO our refusal to take the learning of foreign languages truly seriously is a bigger problem to overcome than the national debt.

Like too many of my generation, I'm lousy at other languages. And I blame it on the idiot school board when I grew up in rural Wisconsin who, when I started high school offered up to two years of German and Spanish, and when I graduated, had reduced the offerings to Spanish only. And even if they had it high school, that was already too late.

It's like saying you can start math when you're 15 without having had anything in grades 1-9.

If I were a parent today, I'd want my kid to have three languages before they got to high school, and five before they graduated from college. And it wouldn't be negotiable any more than reading and writing and 'rithmetic would be.

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