Native and Non-native english speakers

I just read the article, Is it an English as a Second Language World?by someone who read about it in the Financial Times. The article seemed really long, but it was interesting to me. The article was about how the number of people speaking English is growing. This may become a problem because the native English speakers know the language but the people wanting to learn it are learning different things. The article stated that 50 years ago more people spoke English then any other language except Mandarin. Well, now more people are speaking Spanish, and English is in fifth place. Non-native speakers outnumber native speakers.

This amazes me because I thought there were a huge number of native-English speakers. I chose to read about it because I wonder why people would want to go through the trouble in learning another language. I also have an answer; people are traveling across the world and want to understand people who actually live there. Now a days in some resorts you have to speak more than 2 languages fluently. I know this for a fact because over the summer I traveled to a resort in Cabo, San Lucas, Mexico. The workers there told us that in order to get a job they had to speak Spanish and English fluently, plus another language like German. I’m learning Spanish right now and it’s challenging at times, for example, conjugating the verbs and if it’s feminine or masculine. While I was Spanish class my teacher said it’s actually harder if your Spanish learning English because in English there are things like pronouns, more punctuation, and more rules you have to know. Another thing is my cousins live in Hong Kong and can s[eak English and Mandarin pretty fluently, they’re now learning a little of Spanish and French. I think that might be tough to learn more than one language at a time, but it will help them in the future. I agree with the article that soon the “non-native speakers will be communicating with one another that the native speakers will have to be the ones who have to adapt.”