I wish we as society could simply have one language to overcome language barriers, but that’s more of a content for my daydreaming.
I often encounter issues due to language barriers.
Mainly with 2 languages.
Since the start of war, I’ve been encountering lots of Ukrainians I can’t really speak with. Especially when I was on a dorm, where they were a great majority.
Not that I tend to talk with people, but I felt weird after a while.
Probably like someone who doesn’t speak Spanish in the US (at least I assume that’s fairly common over there).
And now searching for a job, I found many companies want you to know German.
Which I also encountered as “would’ve been useful now” a few times.
Seems like I should know an answer to this, as English isn’t my first language, but I have no fucking idea how I picked it up. I never made any serious attempt (i.e.: studying for more than a week) to learn it.
I acquired English by immersing in content that I found engaging and interesting for large amounts of time daily over multiple years. Currently have a C2 certificate, though I do sometimes make mistakes while outputting.
I recommend reading these if you want to learn more about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/table-of-contents (you can skip japanese specific stuff [including Anki if it’s not a CJK language], and I’d not touch his community chats because of the insane amounts of racism and pedophilia in them)