Imagine being an English language native speaker. You can use your language wherever you are. You can reach out to a 1 billion audience without learning a foreign language. All the difficult and bookish words create your rich vocabulary (I used to be on the path to having a rich English vocabulary but the illnesses took it away).
But no. Your native language is Czech. Your reach is 10 million people. But don’t get me wrong. The Czech tongue is definitely a language of literature, both novels and non-fiction. Unlike Yiddish, you can read books by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, or Steven Pinker in Czech. The only issue is that the translators are paid so badly that translation isn’t always perfect.
Even if I were a native speaker of Chinese, Hindu, Spanish, French, Russian or German I could write blog for tens of millions of people. But no, the Czech language is the only tongue I speak without an accent (or rather the Common Czech accent).
I can listen, read, write, and speak, yet not think in English. But at least I acquired at least some command of the beautiful English language so I can enrich (hopefully) other people.
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