This is an excerpt from Bill Gates’ post on our way of communicating, our language, recommended… By Bill Gates | September 7, 2023 If there’s one skill I wish I had, it’s the ability to learn languages and get good at them. (I’m not talking about computer languages.) I took Greek and Latin in high school, but I didn’t stick with either one. A while ago, I tried learning French with the app Duolingo , with the same result. Now, I’m trying French again, and I’m finally making some real progress. But the process has made one thing clear to me: There’s a lot I still don’t understand about how languages work. So who better to unconfuse me than the latest guest on my podcast, John McWhorter ? A professor of linguistics at Columbia University, John is someone I’ve already learned a great deal from. He’s dedicated his career to demystifying the roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the world—and when he isn’t teaching college students, he’s busy sharing his knowledg...