I genuinely hate how English is becoming a sort of de facto global language. Just more cultural imperialism. But it's very nice to be able to communicate with comrades from around the world, it might be my favorite aspect of this site. So I do appreciate you all taking effort to think something in your native language, translate it in your head, then type it up in English. Hopefully in FALGSC we'll get our universal translators, too.
For real, learning languages is hard. I had 2 years of Spanish in high school and didn't do too well, something in my brain just didn't click. But maybe you need to use another language a lot to really learn it? I lived in Germany for just two months and by the end I found myself kinda picking up things.
:soviet-heart:
lingua francas are good imo. they often come about due to hegemonic powers, IE Arabic due to the caliphate, Chinese back in the day, French in the medieval era, Latin in pax Romana for like 1000 years, and English now since the height of British and later American imperialism, which is bad. but, it's cool it forms this backbone of international communication and I'd imagine that one is probably always gonna be a thing, at least in a global region if not worldwide
It makes so much knowledge available to you. I remember having a much easier time in college and grad school writing reports and doing research because i could just default to english with minimal pain, my non-bilingual peers would try to do all their research in our native language first and then branch out when they were having trouble.
And in India it gives us a language that people from different regions can speak to each other. Much of India speaks Hindi, but there are many other languages as well. Some states have gotten really pissed when the govt has tried to make Hindi a compulsory subject nationwide