Flying Under the Radar

Language skills are such an important part of any person ...
In fact, it is so important that one can be mislead into perceiving people lacking language skills as being less qualified, intelligent or talented.

I have often found myself making a hasty judgement about a person's overall competency simply because they could not speak English well.

But I have realized that Intelligence and Brilliance need no spoken language. Or a written one.

I believe that this is one of the reasons why China (and Japan in earlier years) was able to fly under the radar for so long, even while undertaking massive efforts to build infrastructure. I think that there is a certain degree of disbelief that the Chinese, with their lack of English language skills could create such amazing plans.

Its unfortunate that knowledge of English is so often the primary judging factor of a person's intelligence.

Comments

desi diva said…
I hear you on this one. Its sad we judge people based on their knowledge of the English language. There are so many immigrants who come to the country and they probably can speak more languages than we do (and are also very highly educated).

Somehow we hold English as the gold standard, and if you don't know it, it equates you with having less intelligence.

Hopefully this will change one day, but I unfortunately don't see many people being that tolerant.
Great post!

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