0:12 The language I'm speaking right now
0:15 is on its way to becoming the world's universal language ,
0:19 for better or for worse .
0:23 it's the language of the internet ,
0:25 it's the language of finance ,
0:27 it's the language of air traffic control ,
0:32 English is everywhere .
0:34 Now , Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people ,
0:38 but more Chinese people are learning English
0:40 than English speakers are learning Chinese .
0:45 there are two dozen universities in China right now
0:48 teaching all in English .
0:51 English is taking over .
0:53 And in addition to that ,
0:55 it's been predicted that at the end of the century
0:58 almost all of the languages that exist now - -
1:01 there are about 6,000 - -
1:02 will no longer be spoken .
1:04 There will only be some hundreds left .
1:09 it's at the point where instant translation of live speech
1:13 is not only possible , but it gets better every year .
1:17 The reason I'm reciting those things to you
1:20 is because I can tell that we're getting to the point
1:23 where a question is going to start being asked ,
1:25 which is : Why should we learn foreign languages - -
1:29 other than if English happens to be foreign to one ?
1:33 Why bother to learn another one when it's getting to the point
1:36 where almost everybody in the world will be able to communicate in one ?
1:42 I think there are a lot of reasons ,
1:44 but I first want to address
1:46 the one that you're probably most likely to have heard of ,
1:49 because actually it's more dangerous than you might think .
1:55 that a language channels your thoughts ,
1:58 that the vocabulary and the grammar of different languages
2:02 gives everybody a different kind of acid trip ,
2:08 That is a marvelously enticing idea ,
2:12 but it's kind of fraught .
2:13 So it's not that it's untrue completely .
2:17 So for example , in French and Spanish
2:20 the word for table is , for some reason , marked as feminine .
2:25 So , " la table , " " la mesa , " you just have to deal with it .
2:30 that if you are a speaker of one of those languages
2:33 and you happen to be asked
2:35 how you would imagine a table talking ,
2:39 then much more often than could possibly be an accident ,
2:43 a French or a Spanish speaker
2:45 says that the table would talk with a high and feminine voice .
2:50 So if you're French or Spanish , to you , a table is kind of a girl ,
2:54 as opposed to if you are an English speaker .
2:57 It's hard not to love data like that ,
2:59 and many people will tell you that that means
3:01 that there's a worldview that you have if you speak one of those languages .
3:06 But you have to watch out ,
3:07 because imagine if somebody put us under the microscope ,
3:12 the us being those of us who speak English natively .
3:14 What is the worldview from English ?
3:18 So for example , let's take an English speaker .
3:21 Up on the screen , that is Bono .
3:26 I presume he has a worldview .
3:29 Now , that is Donald Trump .
3:34 he speaks English as well .
3:39 And here is Ms . Kardashian ,
3:42 and she is an English speaker , too .
3:44 So here are three speakers of the English language .
3:47 What worldview do those three people have in common ?
3:51 What worldview is shaped through the English language that unites them ?
3:56 It's a highly fraught concept .
3:58 And so gradual consensus is becoming that language can shape thought ,
4:03 but it tends to be in rather darling , obscure psychological flutters .
4:09 It's not a matter of giving you a different pair of glasses on the world .
4:14 Now , if that's the case ,
4:17 then why learn languages ?
4:19 If it isn't going to change the way you think ,
4:21 what would the other reasons be ?
4:25 One of them is that if you want to imbibe a culture ,
4:31 if you want to drink it in , if you want to become part of it ,
4:34 then whether or not the language channels the culture - -
4:38 and that seems doubtful - -
4:40 if you want to imbibe the culture ,
4:41 you have to control to some degree
4:44 the language that the culture happens to be conducted in .
4:47 There's no other way .
4:49 There's an interesting illustration of this .
4:51 I have to go slightly obscure , but really you should seek it out .
4:55 There's a movie by the Canadian film director Denys Arcand - -
5:00 read out in English on the page , " Dennis Ar - cand , "
5:02 if you want to look him up .
5:04 He did a film called " Jesus of Montreal . "
5:07 And many of the characters
5:09 are vibrant , funny , passionate , interesting French - Canadian ,
5:14 French - speaking women .
5:15 There's one scene closest to the end ,
5:18 where they have to take a friend to an Anglophone hospital .
5:21 In the hospital , they have to speak English .
5:23 Now , they speak English but it's not their native language ,
5:26 they'd rather not speak English .
5:28 And they speak it more slowly ,
5:30 they have accents , they're not idiomatic .
5:32 Suddenly these characters that you've fallen in love with
5:35 become husks of themselves , they're shadows of themselves .
5:41 and to only ever process people through that kind of skrim curtain
5:45 is to never truly get the culture .
5:47 And so to the extent that hundreds of languages will be left ,
5:50 one reason to learn them
5:52 is because they are tickets to being able to participate
5:55 in the culture of the people who speak them ,
5:58 just by virtue of the fact that it is their code .
6:01 So that's one reason .
6:06 that if you speak two languages , dementia is less likely to set in ,
6:11 and that you are probably a better multitasker .
6:14 And these are factors that set in early ,
6:17 and so that ought to give you some sense
6:19 of when to give junior or juniorette lessons in another language .
6:24 Bilingualism is healthy .
6:28 languages are just an awful lot of fun .
6:32 Much more fun than we're often told .
6:34 So for example , Arabic : " kataba , " he wrote ,
6:37 " yaktubu , " he writes , she writes .
6:41 " Uktub , " write , in the imperative .
6:44 What do those things have in common ?
6:46 All those things have in common
6:48 the consonants sitting in the middle like pillars .
6:53 and the vowels dance around the consonants .
6:56 Who wouldn't want to roll that around in their mouths ?
6:59 You can get that from Hebrew ,
7:01 you can get that from Ethiopia's main language , Amharic .
7:06 Or languages have different word orders .
7:09 Learning how to speak with different word order
7:11 is like driving on the different side of a street if you go to certain country ,
7:16 or the feeling that you get when you put Witch Hazel around your eyes
7:21 and you feel the tingle .
7:22 A language can do that to you .
7:26 " The Cat in the Hat Comes Back , "
7:28 a book that I'm sure we all often return to ,
7:32 One phrase in it is , " Do you know where I found him ?
7:37 Do you know where he was ? He was eating cake in the tub ,
7:41 Fine . Now , if you learn that in Mandarin Chinese ,
7:43 then you have to master ,
7:45 " You can know , I did where him find ?
7:47 He was tub inside gorging cake ,
7:49 No mistake gorging chewing ! "
7:51 That just feels good .
7:52 Imagine being able to do that for years and years at a time .
7:56 Or , have you ever learned any Cambodian ?
8:00 Me either , but if I did ,
8:04 I would get to roll around in my mouth not some baker's dozen of vowels
8:09 but a good 30 different vowels
8:12 scooching and oozing around in the Cambodian mouth
8:19 That is what a language can get you .
8:22 And more to the point ,
8:23 we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language .
8:27 It used to be that you had to go to a classroom ,
8:29 and there would be some diligent teacher - -
8:32 some genius teacher in there - -
8:33 but that person was only in there at certain times
8:36 and you had to go then ,
8:37 and then was not most times .
8:39 You had to go to class .
8:40 If you didn't have that , you had something called a record .
8:43 I cut my teeth on those .
8:45 There was only so much data on a record ,
8:49 or even that antique object known as a CD .
8:51 Other than that you had books that didn't work ,
8:54 that's just the way it was .
8:55 Today you can lay down - -
8:58 lie on your living room floor ,
9:02 and teach yourself any language that you want to
9:05 with wonderful sets such as Rosetta Stone .
9:07 I highly recommend the lesser known Glossika as well .
9:11 You can do it any time ,
9:12 therefore you can do it more and better .
9:15 You can give yourself your morning pleasures in various languages .
9:19 I take some " Dilbert " in various languages every single morning ;
9:23 it can increase your skills .
9:24 Couldn't have done it 20 years ago
9:26 when the idea of having any language you wanted
9:31 coming from your phone ,
9:33 would have sounded like science fiction to very sophisticated people .
9:37 So I highly recommend
9:40 that you teach yourself languages other than the one that I'm speaking ,
9:44 because there's never been a better time to do it .
9:47 It's an awful lot of fun .
9:49 It won't change your mind ,
9:50 but it will most certainly blow your mind .
