It is very clear now that English should be the primary foreign language taught in all schools around the world Learning a different foreign language before English is in today s world a waste of time Do you agree or disagree with this statement

Which is the most spoken language in the world? This is a key question to recognise the idiom that should be chosen as the international one, to be taught as first foreign language in all the countries of the world. Except, of course, the countries where such a language is already the official one.

First of all, one should consider if the number of people using an idiom all over the world is a good criterion to choose Earth's idiom. In so doing, we have to face that Chinese is the first one, with almost two billions people speaking it. Someone could object that it is a language spoken only in a specific geographic area: why should one in France learn Chinese?

Because of this limit, academics and politicians frequently state that the criterion to be considered to choose "the language of planet Earth" should be selected considering the number of countries where an idiom is used. According to this approach, one could propose Spanish because is spoken in almost all central, south America and of course Spain. Nonetheless, are we sure that is Spanish the most spread language on our planet? The answer is obviously "No". So, we should ask ourselves: “which language is spoken in at least three of the five continents?” There’s only one idiom, and that’s English.

If English is effectively the most spread language in the world, someone could argue about the real need of knowing English for a person living in Peru. It’s not possible to say that he would be completely wrong, but at the same time that person should think which is the language more used to move or travel around the world. In north America the main and perhaps only language spoken is English, and so in Oceania. In Africa, also countries colonized by French or Italian during the 19th century have nowadays English as second official language. If we consider that also in Europe the official language of European Union is English, we realize that only in Asia one could have any problem in communicating. To learn English as primary foreign language is, indeed, a must so not to waste time learning another idiom, useful only in few countries.

All these things considered, I have to state that English is the ideal language to be learned as primary foreign one. It is not at all a waste of time, because in a globalised world we are having wider access to information, in a way that our grandparents could have only dream for their grandchildren. In the end, if one wants to travel for work, for leisure or if one desires to migrate to get a better life elsewhere, the knowledge of English is a must. Because no other language allows you to travel anywhere on our planet with the hope to be understood in almost 70% of the countries in the world.