What can a cave tell us about the need to study English?

There is absolutely no necessity to use English in daily life in Japan. However, I strongly believe that more Japanese (indeed, any non-native speakers) should use English and increase their exposure to the world outside of Japan (their own country). This article is about an analogy that I recall every time I encounter people who are not willing to try to use English – the most common language on earth.

   As an example, during my research today, I wanted to learn about the “sigmoid function (シグモイド関数)”. The first thing I did was Google it. I put the phrase within quotation marks “” to search exactly this phrase. The English and Japanese version of Google showed 363,000 and 13,600 hits, respectively. The English Google showed about 30 times more results than the Japanese one. Therefore, it is easy to conclude from this result that “using English provides access to more information”. But, what does this “30 times more information” actually mean? I would like to think about this by using the analogy of a “cave and a flashlight”.

   Assume that you are walking deep inside a cave. The only thing you have with you is a small flashlight. You can barely see anything, even your own feet. Due to the lack of visual information, you may easily stumble on a stone or not notice dangerous animals waiting for you only a few meters away. As long as we use this small flashlight, we have to accept such dangers because that is how our world is.

   But, what if we have a flashlight that shines with a 30 times broader beam, or 30 times the range of the small one? The improved visibility would undoubtedly help us avoid potential dangers, or at least better prepare for them.

   More importantly, the new flashlight would reveal a variety of information about the cave such as its size, shape, color, pattern, texture etc.; information which we may only vaguely notice when using the small flashlight. We would most likely find that our world was more huge, beautiful, curious and complicated than we had expected. The small flashlight might be enough for us to survive, but the bigger, more powerful flashlight would certainly raise the probability for us to find something that could make our life better.

   In summary, I hope readers might get a new perspective about the use of English in daily life from this analogy. Of course, the main problem is that this article cannot be discovered by the small flashlight...

Batu caves, Malaysia