You already know I listen to a lot of news, mostly national and international. But you don't have to be a news junkie to hear interviews with people all over the world, and I dare say you're almost always listening...in English.
I'm stating the obvious to make a point: as English has become the lingua franca of the world, we native English speakers tend to take completely for granted the fact that the world is learning our language (unfortunately for my profession as a foreign language teacher 🙂).
You can probably count on one hand the number of interviews you've heard lately, with non-native English speakers, that had to take place with the use of an interpreter. More often than not, it seems there is a worthy interviewee nearby who speaks English -- meaning, and again stating the obvious here -- they have taken the time and effort to learn an entirely new language. Not just to read, but to speak.
Being a language nerd, I of course pay special attention to this. And I've known people personally who have learned English, having never set foot in an anglophone country, simply by consuming English language media -- whether online, watching English movies and television, and yes, by studying it in school.
But this week I heard the most remarkable example of this that I've heard to date: a young Ukrainian man speaking American English with such fluency that you couldn't tell he wasn't an American (except for one small grammar mistake I happened to notice -- hey, I'm a language teacher). According to the reporter, young Vitali has learned English almost entirely by listening to English language movies and TV shows.
You can hear Vitali speak here (a 5-minute listen), and I encourage you to listen not only to understand the point of this post, but more importantly to hear his first-hand account of life in war-torn Ukraine.
In today's media world, it's possible to listen to almost any of your regular shows in a foreign language, especially the most widely spoken ones. Next time you watch a Netflix show, just click on the options if you're not familiar with them and you might be surprised. If you're the parent of young children, you don't have to wait for kids to be in school before they start learning; there are countless resources available for all ages. You can even start with something as simple as setting your devices to the language of your choice, or putting sticky notes with vocabulary words on objects around the house. These are just some of the ideas mentioned in my online mini-course: How to Learn a Foreign Language: 7 Hacks for Making the Daunting Doable.
If you're not inclined to learn another language or improve on one you've studied in the past, we can all at least appreciate the privilege of being born into a language the world wants to learn. And hopefully, at least for some, that will motivate us to reciprocate when the time is right.