Jay Walker on the world's English mania

http://www.ted.com Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English. He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English -- "the world's second language" -- by the thousands.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

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• English
• ESL
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• China
• India

[Mutusen]

I speak Esperanto, and it does not "lack variation and expressiveness".

[RenataVentura]

He says "America" is not pushing english?

The USA and Britain are pushing it. I´ve read that 5% of Great Britain´s revenue comes from international english.

Take away english courses, there goes 5% of their money!

That´s why english speaking countries are always trying to vote down Esperanto when it comes to the ballot.

Esperanto was designed as a neutral, international language. It takes 4 MONTHS to learn and NO MONEY. Online.

Most chinese take 14 YEARS to learn english. Fair?

[bolshevikML]

@DocUnsane Of which 'culture' is International English an expression of?

[DocUnsane]

@RenataVentura ideally esperanto would be a great choice, but in practice language is the expression of a culture/people. and without any sizable population speaking it there is no real drive to learn it.

[crudhousefull]

This guy's on an ego trip. Yes...English is important to us in developing countries...but we haven't forgotten why it's important today. My country had a population of 13,000,000 in 1300AD. After successive European invations, it was reduced to just 1000,000 people in 1800 AD. Most of my culture was erased obviously. English is just a means to an end, and most of the people in my country view Europeans as cold blooded.

[AlDarianos]

@EgonCom there is no chance that russian may turn into global language.It's because population of Russia is rapidly declining and is just one tenth of China's (40% of USA). Their economy is smaller than Spanish and it's based on non renewable resources, want more? ;) IMO chinese language case is quite the same, take into consideration writing system... Indo-european languages are spoken by 1/2 of world population, so I can't believe that some language outside of this family can be dominant.

[EPICXGAMER199]

Why doesn't it stay where it's supper to be

[HoGraz]

@RenataVentura Shh. I'm getting a job teaching English now. Fuck the world.

[mideastatheist]

i am learning English for 3 years .....Ok i can speak , listen , read, and write

but i feel i still away from mastering it !

its just difficult to master a foreigner language !

[moscowmasha]

@chrissomerry

Is there really still a cultural incentive to learn Latin? It is a dead language, after all, and tends only to be used for the purpose of Classical Studies. Also, I was (at least partially) talking about WHY English is the representative language of modern Western culture, and colonization has a lot to do with that.

[chrissomerry]

@RenataVentura Also, 14 years is what most people take to learn any language through a school system - in the west, many don't even reach fluency by that time since they just end up relearning the basics every year until just before the end of highschool. Esperanto would probably have the same happen to it too, unless the way we teach languages is revised in schools. We need more hands-on tuition.