You are missing so much… Just my tiny little country, for instance, has produced so much good stuff that you will never understand or even know that it existed… I wish I could somehow share it with you, but it's not possible until somebody actually invents a real "Babel fish". And that's just not gonna happen. :-/

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I speak 2 languages (English and French). You pretty much need French to survive in this shit hole of a province (Quebec, Canada). My girlfriend speaks English only and she has a hard time and will when she tries to get a job.

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I agree and disagree

I agree that it sucks to only have known one culture.
However people who only speak English are not the only ones who are disadvantaged. People who speak Spanish only, or people who speak Korean only, etc etc are all disadvantaged because they experience only one culture.

I wish I could live a longer life, then I would learn more cultures

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@69,592

Maybe he could reword it to "people who know only one language"

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well i know Java and C++ does that count?

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Isn't there something called "translators" and "subtitles"?

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I live in a country with 11 official languages… Totally outrageous!

I speak only 2 of these, English and Afrikaans being the most prevalent. Most of the languages that my country names as official are rarely spoken…

I've seen that people who can only speak English in my country struggle when meeting new people. Also, knowing another language besides English lets me find others from my country while in another country. I once walked by some guy speaking Afrikaans in England and immediately I knew I had found a friendly face…

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Being able to speak another language is great. It does suck for many of us native English speakers in that we rarely are able to learn another language fluently. For instance, I have learned French, and as the OP said, that has opened up a lot of literature to me — reading translations pales in comparison. I wish that I could learn perfect German, because I love philosophy and I really wish that I could read Kant and Nietzsche's originals. You German anons have no idea how crazily difficult your language is — it's easy to become conversational in German, but it's an almost impossible language for a non-native to master (at least to the extent necessary to read and understand nuance in German literature). The Romance languages are much easier.

However, like it or not, English is far and away the most important language on the planet. It is the de facto language of the Internet. It's even the de facto human language for computer code (it's standard everywhere to write code comments in English, and to name functions and objects after English words). It's definitely the new lingua franca of the planet — if you were dropped anywhere on Earth and couldn't speak the native language, your best bet for communicating would be to try English. It's an accident of history that things worked out this way (blame it on the success of the most powerful empire in human history), because English is really a pretty crappy universal language. It's chock-full of grammatical anomalies and has probably the worst pronunciation rules of any European tongue.

Seriously, the people for whom you should feel sorry are those who never learned English as a second language. They're the ones who are missing out on reading things and being able to contribute to things — the bulk of the content on the Internet, for instance. People who can speak only English are in a much better position than those who can speak any number of languages excluding English.

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I speak German and English. I'm so glad I'm a native German speaker, from what I hear it's pretty hard to learn. I really want to learn Russian for some reason. I wish I was more interested in useful languages like French. I tried to learn it, but I really pissed me off and now I cannot hear French or even a French accent without feeling the urge to cover my ears and sing loudly. No offense, dear French men.

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