A: which language do you speak?
B; well, I studied French at school, but I’ve forgotten most of it. I learnt some Russian while I was studying there and now I study Spanish in evening classes. Do you speak Japanese at home with your parents?
A; yes, I do. I’m learning Chinese now on the internet.
B; how do you find studying a language on the internet?
A: it’s not easy, particularly with listening and speaking, because sometimes the connection isn’t too good.
B; I bet you find the character difficult to write!
A: actually, many of the characters are the same or very similar in both Chinese and Japanese, so they’re easy for me.
B; so , you can read and write much better than you speak and understand other speakers, right?
A; yes. How are the Spanish classes going?
B; in a way, it’s similar to your experience of learning Chinese. Some Spanish words are very similar to English ones. But I need to practise listening to native speakers and saying the words myself.

Intermediate
A; what are you reading?
B: it’s an article about language. It talks about the idea of having a single global language.
A: it seems that English already is the main global language. Does the article suggest that there should be an artificial language like Esperanto as the world language.
B: actually, it suggest English. The main argument is that English is already being studied as a second language in most countries-china, India, mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and japan – so beginning again with a language like Esperanto would be wasteful. The second argument is that English is used in modern technology far more that any other language. Most emails are sent in English and the vast majority of website use English.
A: does the article say anything about other language? How will they survive in an English-speaking world?
B: the article points out that many languages have been lost and will be lost, but others will continue to be used for generation, even if English continues to be the dominant language.
A; right. All the people who speak Chinese. Hindi, French and Spanish aren’t suddenly going to stop using those languages.
B; exactly. The article suggests that those languages will be used, but that they will only rarely be used in international communication between non-native speaker.
A; in that case, I shall continue to learning a few basic phrases in other languages.

Words
Reading writing speaking listening pronouncing spelling alphabet
Character official second/third bilingual native tongue widely spoken
Accent dialect slang formal informal scientific translation interpretation
Linguistics Anglophone Germanic indo-european basic proficient fluent native speaker