English as a Second Language (It Powers the Planet)

So I asked the one who spoke English, I said, why do you want to learn how to speak English? And he said.

What? The comment you made just a minute ago about this is the language of abundance. It's the language of opportunity. It's the language of aspiration. And I think that's the reason they'll.

All say the same thing in every country. They learned how to speak English by watching American cartoons and American television. Nowadays, it's watching and listening to YouTube, but it's incentivized by the idea that you can become an influencer or popular.

You know, started off with a different language, and they learned English, and they are in a communication role. They have a particular way of going about it to checking if you're getting what they're saying. Okay. And I think that that's a great communication skill.

Okay. Hi, everybody. It's Dan Sullivan here, and I'm here with my unpredictable, stimulating, inspiring podcast partner, Mike Koenix. And this is the next episode of. Of Capability Amplifier. And, Mike, I just happened to mention. We were at a conference together, and I just happened to mention something that I noticed with people who speak English, they speak it well, but it's not their first language. And they've learned how to speak.

And I've just noticed, because I've been going to Buenos Aires, where almost everything is in Spanish, and I noticed the doctor who is taking us, Babs and me, through stem cell therapy, which we did a podcast on.

I was noticing how good a communicator she was, because English is not her first language.

I say this, that.

English is the number one second language of people on the planet. Okay. That, you know, English isn't the greatest language. You know, obviously China, Arabic is actually, you know, a bigger language, I think. I don't know, Spanish may be a bigger language than English.

I'll fact check while. While you're doing the intro here. How's that?

Yeah, but I mean, English is in the top two or three. I mean, the top three, but it's not the number one language. But is the number one second language. Okay. And one of the things I want to tell people is that there's a great communication power to having English as a second language if you were born and learned to speak another language. And the thing is, and there's two characteristics I've noticed.

And I've asked other people about this who speak other languages, and they said that someone who makes an attempt to speak English gets far more help from English speakers than people in any other language. France being the Great contrast. If you don't speak French perfectly, they won't speak to you. They'll answer in English. But I've noticed myself that anyone who's trying to speak English, I really help them out.

Okay.

And, but our doctor who runs the clinic in her name is Teresita. She is one of the best explainer of things.

I've ever heard. And the reason is that she'll start, she says, now I'm going to explain what it is that's going to happen during the session. And you say, well, why is that so important? And I'm going to tell you why it's so important that I tell you step by step why we're doing this. And so the first step, we do this and the reason why we do this first. You may ask why we do this first. Well, we do this first or this. And she's only explaining that because English is not her main language. And she's constantly checking with you whether you're picking up on the context. First of all, I find it very charming, but it really makes you listen to the other person because you're just following her thought pattern and you know, some words she doesn't have quite right. And you're, you don't really care because you're getting the context of what she's talking about. You know, not necessarily all the content, but I'm picking and picking it up. And so my, my, my theory is that English is the Latin of the 21st century. You know, that if you, you know, it's like in the Roman Empire there were all sorts of different people, but you better learn Latin, you know, you better learn Latin. And you know, French was the main diplomatic, you know, if you were anywhere on the planet and you were in diplomacy, you know, Benjamin Franklin spoke French, Thomas Jefferson spoke French, you know, because you had to, it was the diplomatic language. But since the British Empire rose more and more English is taking over. And it's very interesting.

The two top business schools in Paris.

All the courses are spoken in English, are taught in English, okay? And the thought was, if you want to be an international business person, number one, you better learn English, you better learn English. Air traffic. The entire air traffic control system in the world is English. The entire economic system is English. And this topic came up in a previous podcast, Mike, because I made a thing, you know, the Internet, the artificial intelligence, this whole movement is an English speaking phenomenon. But what I'm looking forward to is that we're going to have the translators, but still in person to person communication. You're not going to sit there and do a translator. I mean, I just don't see people doing that. And the other thing is people who don't speak English, who want to make it big in the United States, you better learn English or you're not going to make it. You know, you're just not going to. You're not going to make it. So those are my thoughts. But, you know, Ilco, you know, Ilco, you know, goes to Genius Network. He's from the Netherlands, and he's one of the best storyteller I have. But he's got this very, very charming form of English that can only be mastered by someone who learned English. Learned English. And that was just a thought, that was just an insight. And you wrote it down and said, let's do a podcast. So here we are doing a podcast on the subject. But what do you think about that.

Mike? Yep. Sorry, I. I have some insights and some stats first. So I'm going to begin with that, which is here. Can't you hear my English? Can't you hear my English? All right, so it's the first language. So the. I popped it into chat GPT.

You know, I just said I wanted the most spoken languages in the world in order from 1 through 10. So here they are. Mandarin Chinese is number one, followed by Spanish, then English, then Hindi is number four. Bengali is number five. Had no idea. Portuguese is number six. Russian number seven. Japanese is eight. Western Punjabi is number nine. You'll notice that a bunch of these. And then Marathi is number 10. So out of that 1, 2, 3, 4 of these are actually Indian languages. So they, you know, I don't know what they are all totaled together, but the net net is getting back to your basic premise. And as we're recording this, I'm in in Mexico. So I'm going to add to what, what your assertion is. And that is 20 years ago when we came to Mexico.

It was a. It was tough to get through Mexico and 25 years ago without speaking Spanish. And fortunately, Vivian learned Latin early on, so she's always loved romance languages and she's a decent Spanish speaker. Like, she speaks pretty, pretty well. So we always got by. And I could donde el bano, por favor, and ask for mas margaritas, you know, so that's all I needed to care about is where's the bathroom? And what can I have more margaritas. But.

Nowadays, Mexicans, you'll speak to them in Spanish and they'll reply in English.

Many years ago I was in China, and when the Chinese would find out. I'm, I was American. They did not want to help me out at all in Chinese, they want to speak in English. And the same was true in Egypt. So I have found in, in all my travels internationally other than France.

But even there, what France 20 years ago in France, three years ago, are very different places. It's definitely. They've taken their sticks out of their ends. And what I think happened is a combination of two things.

Cartoons and YouTube. And if you talk to most kids around my age and maybe to Millennial, they'll all say the same thing. In every country, they learned how to speak English by watching American cartoons. In American television nowadays, it's watching and listening to YouTube. But it's incentivized by the idea that you can become an influencer or popular if you're younger or you're incentivized by. English is the international language of business, as you said. And if you want to be prosperous, you're going to want to learn it, but not just learn it. I think it's Americanized English. And I still think America owns the mindset of prosperity, abundance and innovation.

Yeah.

And I think that those are the distinctions here. This goes beyond.

The language. It's the culture, the export of the culture, and the mindset that goes along with it. So that would be my, my way of summarizing what I've heard so far. And you and I have had fragments of this conversation before, but not, I.

Think the other thing is that English, first of all, there's about 100 different versions of English spoken on the planet, which are sort of hybrid languages. And I'm sure there's a hybrid Spanish. English.

Oh, yeah, it's Spanglish and it's. Which is hilarious. Yeah. I mean, there was a whole movie made about it and I think in the 90s. Yeah.

And I think the reason why English takes over is that it's. It's the easiest language in the world to get along. Speaking it badly.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

In other words, is that, is that.

Actually factually true or is that your sense?

No, it's just my sense that.

Anybody who visits the United States and.

Has some English and they're asking for something, I noticed that English speakers will give them a lot of help.

I absolutely think that's true. I know when I'm in Mexico or a Spanish speaking country, Portugal too. Holy crap. If they're a native speaker, they're like, just look at you, like an alien. And you're right. You can own four words of English and Be from anywhere and someone you know you're gonna be, you know you're gonna get by. So I, I think again, my experience.

I'll give you a little, I'll give you a little experience from 1966. So this is, you know, this is almost 60 years ago. I was in the U.S. army. And you know, and periodically I would have to take the train from the middle city in Korea, which was called Taegu at that time as Daegu. And there were three cities. There's Seoul, which is the big metropolis, and then there's Busan, which is a port city down at the bottom. And then there's Tegu, it's called Daegu now. D E D A E, G U. And so if you took the train at certain hours, there was a car for US personnel. So if you were in uniform, well, you had to be in uniform and you got on, then you would have your own car. You would have two cars. But if you took it during different hours, you'd have to sit in the Korean, you know, just the general Korean public. And this happened to me twice that the moment I sat down. You know, I try always to get on a train early and I would sit there and immediately there would be three people across from me and two people next to me. They say, speak English, Speak English. And one of them had enough English that he could tell me what it is that they wanted. And uh, and I wanted to read. You know, it was a four hour, four hour trip, four or five hour trip and I wanted to read and I didn't have time. They said, speak English, Speak English. You know. They say hand, Hand. Yeah, hand, hand. They said hand, hand, hand. You know, like that. And I was just, I was exhausted by the end of the trip.

So I asked, you got to be the entertainer. You were the cartoon.

Yeah.

I was the worker. So anyway, so I asked the one who spoke English enough English. I said, why do you want to learn how to speak English? And he said.

And that you're with the comment you made just a minute ago about this is the.

Language of abundance. It's the language of opportunity. It's the language of aspiration.

Yeah.

And I think that's the reason. Okay. French isn't. No, I think Chinese isn't.

No, definitely not. And Finnish definitely isn't. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like someone chewing on a bunch of frogs, throwing up at the same time. I don't know if you've ever like.

It's not even related to Scandinavia.

No, no, it's it's, it's hard to listen to for sure. I, I say that with love to our Finnish brothers and sisters out there who I know are listening right now. But.

I, I think they think, they think it's beautiful.

Yeah, I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. Now I, I love listening to French, you know, and.

But I also think if you're going to have, again, let's say you're going to get a bunch of engineers together or scientists.

And you're going to make something.

Or you're going to write code, you know, it's like you don't see code. I'm sure, you know, Russians write Russian, but I mean in the early days of PCs going over there, everything's written in, in English as well.

Yeah.

And I, that's not gonna stop anytime soon unless you want to be way, way behind the curve. And even with AI systems.

I think there's too much potential to be misinterpreted and no one's gonna want to go back and forth, so.

Well, I think it's ease of use. I think it's ease of use.

Yeah. So I have a, it's also being first, you know, let's just face it. And I think culturally, here's the. I'll add one more thing. I know I am interrupting you, but. No, finish your thought and then I'll give you this, this stack because I have a slight detour we can take this to. I think that's just as important.

Well, fortunately, I forgot what I was going to say, so.

Okay. All right.

Well, there we go.

This is the best.

So English is also.

The language of entertainment. It's Hollywood and I would argue the most influential music created. And you cannot underestimate the power of entertainment. Especially now with again, a predominantly English speaking social media and some of the big characters that exist out there. Mr. Beast being one of them. Who's one of the top. We've talked about him before those. Dean Jackson, about how.

I'm not positive of this, but I'm pretty sure now more people recognize Mr. Beast than even Michael Jackson and other pop stars of the past. And so.

You know, I, I think that that's a huge, huge motivator to be famous and popular and influential, which that even that notion resonates deeply with every kid in every culture now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just a. Interesting thing. But, but I noticed that people who really, you know, started off with a different language and they learned English and they are in a communication role, they have A particular way of going about it to checking if you're getting what they're saying. Okay. And I think that that's a great communication skill. Interesting. Yeah, I think it's. I just think. And it's not that if you're English, you would not develop that particular communication skill of always checking in your audience, you know, but this doctor in Argentina, she just. She's just unusually good at checking that you're with her every step of the way, you know? But I've noticed with other.

Communicators where language is their English is their second language, it just shows that they have another way and they're not really worried about the.

And what I think is they're communicating contextually. They're not communicating so much content wise. It's that they're making sure that you have the context and they're saying, are you comprehending what we're talking about here? You know, and they're always checking if you're with them. And I just think it's something to.

Be imitated on the part of English speakers.

Hey, this is Mike Koenigs. Sorry to interrupt the podcast, but if you're an action taker and ready to transform and reinvent yourself and your business, go to connecttomike.com to learn more and book a conversation with me right now. All right, back to the episode. I'll tell you where my head goes as a nerd. Do you remember the early days of modems? Whether it was an acoustic coupler modem or you had a modem on your phone, there's what's called the handshake and the carrier frequency. So that was the tone that started playing. And. And then you'd hear this.

And both computers would start talking. And it's just using auditory tones over what was made for voice, human voice. But what you're really talking about is a carrier frequency that gets established and what's also called a handshake, and then packets of are exchanged back and forth. And basically the way the Internet works or any kind of network protocol, it's constantly saying, hey, did he get this? Did you get this? Did you get this? Did you get this? Back and forth. And.

You know, again, I'm sensitive to it because I'm in Mexico right now and we've. We've been out of the country a lot lately. And of course, when you're in Argentina, that's a predominantly Portuguese speaking sound.

Spanish. Spanish.

Oh, it's Spanish sound.

Spanish, yeah.

Right. I'm sorry, I was thinking Brazil.

Oh, just Brazil.

Yeah, yeah. Whoops. Okay. So important or Argentinian Spanish is definitely different than Spain's Spanish, as is Mexico. You know, the Spaniards think they speak the only one.

Yeah. In Argentina, they call it high Spanish.

One of the staff members at the clinic was born in Cordoba in Spain. And our limousine driver, who's Argentinian, we would go places where she would go with us because nobody spoke English at the other end.

So the MRI clinic and I went to get orthotics, and nobody spoke English. And so she would. She would translate. And the limousine driver said, you know her Spanish? Carmen. Her name's Carmen. And he says, you know, Carmen's Spanish is really, really good. She says, you know, Argentinians don't speak that kind. And they have sort of, you know, it's probably what happened. British English in the United States.

Sorry.

Yeah, get some water.

I breathed in when I should have been swallowing.

Oh, okay.

And.

The.

And everything. And he says, there's just a lot of words that we have that wouldn't be recognizable in Spain. And I said, that probably was true in America. In the United States, at one time, the British wouldn't recognize it, but everybody gets American tv, so they get it. But it's very interesting. The person who cuts my hair, he's from Vietnam. He actually escaped from Vietnam. Made an attempt at 15 when he was caught. Made an attempt at 16. Was caught. Made an attempt at this. After the North Vietnamese took over and he got out at 18, he had to walk across Cambodia. Not Cambodia, but Thailand. And then get a boat that took him to Malaysia, where he was in a refugee camp and came to Canada.

And I said, did you speak English? And he says, no, my parents spoke French. They were from the north of Vietnam. And he said, so I knew quite a bit of French, but I didn't know any English. And he didn't live in Saigon. He lived.

Area. And.

I said, so you arrived in Canada with no English whatsoever in Toronto, which is. I mean, people say, well, you speak French there. People in Toronto do not speak French, I can tell you. And they might speak Mandarin, but they don't speak French. And so anyway, I said, so how did you learn to speak English? He said, the UN and the Restless.

Yeah. Yep.

And he said, they had the captioning button at that time where you could push the cap and I could read the language, and I could video record, and I would go over and I had my dictionary, and I would look over and, you know. And so he said, probably the first five years, I had minimal language. But he said, I'm here for the rest of my life. And he's terrific. I mean, he's got a great sense of humor. And he picked. Humor is really the indication if you, if you know the language is really humor.

Yeah, yeah. If you understand idioms and colloquialisms.

And he's very funny. He's very funny. He's very, he's very smart. And. But it was just a little thing that I noticed that English speakers could learn from a person who doesn't have English as their first language of how they make sure that the listener is getting what they're saying. And I think a lot of, you know, and I'm guilty of it as anyone now just go along that everybody's understanding what I'm saying, but I'm not really checking to see if they really do understand.

They may be getting the words, but they may not be getting the context.

Yeah. And I think that's.

And again, as an English speaker, it's. It's hard for me to imagine other than, I know.

Like we're right now in Mexico, tenses get messed up. You got present tense, past tense, future tense. And for us, in.

Well, and they have, they have genders too. They have.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like AI generated video when we do the translations can just can mess up the, the gender in the tense. And.

I think again, this is going to propel English even further because the majority of all these platforms that are doing language translation are also, you know, they, they're initially, I think, for the most part English, other than in, in. In China. There is one thing that is happening, a trend which some of the devices are out where they're. Their half second delay real time. So it'll be like I walk up to you and I'll give you the. A little earpod or an airpod. You wear one, I wear one, and we'll hear each other translated.

In near real time instead of having to talk into a device and show it and go back and forth. But.

The other thing that it does aid with is, you know, in his case, you know, he had to fight hard and it was harder before where, you know, it'd be like, watch tv, look at the subtitles, have a dictionary next to you.

You know, what we're going to either see is, is an increase in laziness because it'll all be done in real time and dubbed and lip synced.

And I hope we. And again, I see this as an absolute hypocrite because we've been spending a ton of time in Mexico Property down here. We're just got this place in Spain. I still do not speak Spanish because it's just easy as an English speaker to navigate and it's gotten significantly easier in 25 years. It's gotten easier five years.

Yeah, yeah. So that tells you that there's a definite trend in this direction.

Yeah.

And I think your.

Comment that first, you know, the first in is a really big. What's that called in the technological world that.

Oh yeah, it's.

Advantage, some first mover advantage, but there's a better mover advantage.

Yeah, yeah. But the thing was.

That.

American, America, the US became a very influential country.

Right at the beginning of the technological age. I'm not talking about the industrial age, but the technological age. And what I mean by that is radio, recording, movies and everything, they became.

Yeah. Entertainment. Yeah. And I'd argue gaming, which is a network. It's, it's in the number, number one.

Number one sport in the world is gaming, you know, and.

Two and a half billion people game, you know.

As far as they can tell. But it's just an interesting thing. You know, I have, I wrote that book Geometry for Staying Cool and Calm. There's three rules, everything's made up, so just feel free to make things up. And number two is nobody's in charge. So.

And number three is life's not fair, you know, and, and it's not fair that there should be a dominant language. But guess what? That's what there is.

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta appeal to grade, popularity, fame, ease. I, I think within that context it's a clear hands down winner. And again, I, I haven't up until like when you told me thematically this, the idea of English as a second language.

Other than the tiny story you told me about going to Argentina, I, I had no idea what you fully meant. And you know, going into this, maybe you didn't either until we improvised a little. But it's a really interesting conversation. And what I'm going to do, what I'm committed to doing is, is because I'm here in Mexico and I'm going to be around a bunch of folks from different countries, not just Spanish speakers. I'm going to have the, I'm going to extend this conversation. I really want to hear what they have to say about it and what their point of view is without our bias, our obvious bias.

Well, the other thing, there's no governing body for English. Like in French they have the academy and the academy won't allow non French words. You know, they, they're Very, very strict.

You know, and we are very inclusive that way. And not the bad kind of inclusive. Yeah, it's sort of like we're not afraid to butcher or adopt or take anything that's a shortcut. And it's a shortcut creation language too.

Yeah. Well, the other thing is it has the most words. It's three or four times the number of words in English. Because if a word works, it's into the language, you know, if a word works, you know, you know, there's all sorts of French words, there's all sorts of German words, and you know, bistro is a Russian word, you know, and Indian words.

You know, and everything in America, you know, in the English language, since there's no governing body, if the language works, I mean, if the word works, go for it, you know. So it's kind of an entrepreneurial language. Yeah, maybe that's the key to it, that it's.

I was just going to say this is something that I don't know the answer to, but maybe you'll have an idea or sense of it, which would be, you know, the way a meme works. So if, let's say you walked up to someone 200 years ago and you said iPhone that have no freaking clue what you mean. Right. Because the whole idea of an iPhone means a lot of stuff. There's a lot of functionality here, a lot of technology or even TV or whatever. And we have memes. Yeah, Kleenex. Exactly. Yeah. A disposable tissue to wipe your nose and that. Yeah, precisely. So, yeah, a trademark. And so I wonder if you compared all of the memes.

You know, like multi purpose single idea words that are very meaningful and have historical precedent, technical precedent, functionality outcome, a concentration of ideas. And I can remember when I went to Egypt, this is over 20 years ago now, and we were learning, you know, we have this archaeologist historian walking with us, showing us. And I don't remember the words, but basically he or he's an etymologist, so. And archaeologist. But he'd go through a word that was. Became a concept and then the Greeks adopted it, maybe it was Macedonians and then the Greeks and then the Romans and then it moved on to, let's say, English from there. There may have been someone in between. And these words became significantly more complex in terms of their meaning as they stacked. And you could really see the etymology, how meaning became more meaningful over time. And then again with the acceleration of technology and.

The fact that we're willing to adopt anything in an entrepreneurial way.

Fascinating. So I'd be curious if there's. I don't know what the.

I think it's. I think it's. Well, it's the entertainment language and it's the entrepreneurial language. And what. Where are people's aspirations?

Well, I always say get paid, get laid, live forever. Right? So it's make more money, be more popular and live longer, have more access to a higher quality life. And all those are a better life. So I think hands down, it wins.

Yeah, yeah. But I think it's. It's an incredibly adaptable language, you know, and, you know, and so anyway, it was just a little observation which.

Told me that really pay attention to whether people are actually getting, you know, they're really picking up on what you're actually saying. And just struck me, but I was. It had to be someone who didn't speak English who taught me this. You know, they're learning. It's a second language that they've learned.

Well, I have an interesting idea.

I have to think about this because it's going to be a little more complicated than what I'm about to say, but I've been using this tool.

That translates. You've seen my demos from stage, the one I did at Genius Network where I took Joe, Polish and Owens. He was speaking in Italian and French and Spanish and then Mandarin. Maybe it was Arabic too. But.

I've been thinking, wow, it'd be kind of interesting to take our podcasts and do multilingual versions now, doing two different voices simultaneously and matching those up. I have to do a little research first to see if it works properly because, you know, like, when you feed it in.

It actually shifts the words to make sense in whatever language it is, and it extends things and it lip syncs as well. But I'm going to see if it's possible to do a multilingual version. This would be a great first episode that would become multilingual.

In our voice and then have that native speaker say, well, it made sense or didn't. Here's how accurate it is, because it's not perfect, but it's good enough to be acceptable. And one of the things that I thought would be fascinating over the next year is if we took what we're doing. So there's two ideas. One of them is do a multilingual podcast. The second is.

You know, the idea of doing the audiobooks. And one of the things that Zach started doing is he said, some people say, well, yeah, I want it converted to English, duh, but we can use the tools to create multilingual audiobooks as well. So I'm actually going to translate my audiobooks because I've got three books now that will have officially been done with AI that sound damn near perfect. But we could do Spanish, French, Portuguese. Those are probably the best languages to begin with, maybe even Japanese. And imagine how you and Strategic Coach can reach more of an audience. And I don't know what the demand is, but I would imagine, you know, your books are popular enough.

Yeah, well, I mean, the, the.

I.

Don'T know about the, you know, the ones we did with Hay House, but the original book we did with publisher in San Francisco, the Laws of Lifetime Growth and that. I think it's 26 languages that's been translated into.

But that's just printed.

That's printed, yeah.

And right now, audiobooks, I believe I'll double check this, but I think they're outselling one to one.

It's one to one.

It is right now. Okay. Someone had told me that it creeped above or crept above, but if that's the latest stats. It's the latest stats, but it's, you know, most entrepreneurs I know. So here's what I do believe is higher value audiences who have less time are more inclined to consume with audio right now. And I would suspect that the volume of podcast.

Content consumption probably exceeds audiobooks.

So I'd be curious what's about to happen. But yeah, I'm going to do a little research and some thinking about this and then getting back to.

Well, there we are. We've launched a project. Yeah, you can't ask for anything more.

Yep. Yeah, well, we get to make stuff up for a living and people buy it from us. So welcome to the best life ever. More to come.

All right. All right, well, let's wrap it up.

This has been another episode of Capability Amplifier. I'm here with my very good friend Dan Sullivan, genius from Strategic Coach. Always fun to create with you. And if you love this episode, make sure you share it with someone, especially a non native speaker, because I'd love to hear in comments what they have say, hear and say about this point of view. So that's it. Unless you got something else to add, Dan?

Nope, I'm, I'm talked out.

All right.

Officially talked out. I appreciate it.

All right, thanks a lot. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Bye. Bye.