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Let's clear the air about language. The working language wherever you are is the language you need to be fluent in.
This applies everywhere in the world.
Some years ago, I lived in a country where English was not the working language at grocery stores and all such places. It was not the working language in schools for children through the U. S. equivalent of high school.
Therefore, when I went shopping for food, I needed to know exactly what were the correct words, in French in my case, for milk, bread, coffee, and shampoo. That is the short list.
I used an English-French dictionary all the time, to build vocabulary.
I'm sure I garbled verb tenses often. Yet somehow I gained more proficiency, to do things like telling the dry cleaner there was a hole in a shirt. I practiced for a day learning to say, by phone---the hardest form of communication in another language, since using your hands and pointing are out of the question---to tell a Hoover repair place the symptoms for my vacuum cleaner's most recent breakdown.
I also learned that Hoover is a verb, for everyone "Hoovered" where I was.
When English-speaking kids moved to the country where I was living, most were put into French-soeaking schools, where they were expected to learn to swim in the French language quickly or drown (fail) very quickly. Some parents chose one of the international or private schools available on the continent.
The picture changed entirely where my husband worked in that country. English is the language of professional people all over the world.
In my husband's place of work, where multiple countries and languages were represented, English was "it" as far as getting work done-for speaking and writing.
Yes, you could speak French or German or another language if everyone in your working group shared that language.
However, when that was not the case, English was, once again, "it."
If it had not been English, then everyone would have learned the language that was "it"---just as I suppose at one time everyone wanting to work learned Latin or Italian or whatever language was the unifying language of the day.
All of this has nothing to do, as far as I can see, with what language is "best," the "prettiest," or the "smartest" language in the world. It has to do with what language, due to a number of factors political and otherwise, has risen to the surface, attached to one or more countries that are, at the time, pace-setters for other countries seeking to rise in influence.
This brings us, finally, to the place, in local budgets, of English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in your town and my town.
Are such classes appropriately budgeted for? Are they given the priority needed for new adult workers?
Children can learn to swim in any language very quickly. Adults need some cushion, like formal classes and willingness to mix with native speakers of the "it" language. '
If ESL is not budgeted where you are (French was not "budgeted" where I lived, so I paid for a 6-week course in basic French), then here is another idea.
Today someone very close to me told me of an immigrant to the U. S. that learned to speak English fluently through independent study. She watched Sesame Street and other children's programs on television, and listened to English radio a lot.
That reminded me how I learned a lot of French when I had to---by listening to the radio in the car and to French television programs, including sitcoms, at other times.
I remember, for example, weeks of wondering what "meteo" meant and deciding not to look it up but to try to become more proficient in accompanying words.
Finally, I figured out what you French-speakers know: it's "weather"!
I did not need to work in French, so I did not have to be as intense as someone who did need the language for work. However, I did need it for the business of keeping an apartment going and helping my husband and me have food, clean clothes, a working car, train tickets to other towns and every other part of daily life.
Leaning another language is not essential unless you need it. That sounds like a Yogi-ism, for Yogi Berra might have put it like that.
And that makes it no less true.
If you know someone struggling to learn English, please do not tell them you'll help by learning their language! Please do not try to interpret every word for them, unless to teach! Show them patience and Sesame Street's location on their local television schedule. Also, show them how to tape that and other programs for children, in English.
That way, they will hear and learn good English and avoid some of the bad examples coming out of the mouths of angry people sometimes using words they, you, and I do not need to know in any language.
Above all, do not underestimate anyone's ability to learn another language if they are thrown into it! Do not think or act patronizingly! Learning a new language is done all the time in hundreds of places around the world every day. The satisfactions of progress are indescribable!
Know your language; be willing to help or encourage others in your country to know it too.
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