I’ve often felt that it’s a terrible disadvantage being relatively monolingual compared to the many Europeans I’ve met who have wonderfully good English. They speak a second (or third) language fluently, and I have nothing like that level of command in any other language than English.
On the other hand, the fact that English is the world’s lingua franca does mean that English speakers get lots of exposure to a variety of non-native accents (not to mention native-speakers’ accents from America to India to Australia). Speakers of other languages don’t expect foreigners to address them in it (contrast: English tourist in the Netherlands to Dutch tourist in England).
And so the monolinguist’s advantage: being better able to decipher the mangled or oddly accented speech of non-native speakers. Still not much consolation for not having perfect French or Japanese though, is it?
To close on a different tack, you should read P. Z. Myers on the idiotic American journalist who reckoned that students don’t need to learn algebra.
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