English is spoken everywhere, better than ever. So why bother learning anything else? Fair question — and the honest answer has nothing to do with ordering at a restaurant.
English is the world's reserve language, the way the dollar is still the reserve currency. Everyone holds some. Every airport, every hotel, every counterparty of consequence will transact with you in it. And precisely because everyone holds it, it confers no local advantage anywhere. You can transact in the reserve asset. You cannot belong in it.
The local language is the local equity: illiquid, slow to acquire, mispriced by almost everyone — and the only instrument that pays the dividends that matter. Not the tourist dividends; the tourist economy runs perfectly well on English, which is exactly why the restaurant is a strawman. The real dividends are paid in private and professional rooms: the conversation that continues after the meeting formally ends, the dinner where the actual terms are set, the landlord deciding which applicant he trusts, the notary explaining what the document really says, the neighbors deciding whether you are a guest or a resident. Those doors never open for strict English-only speakers. They open quietly, and only from the inside.
Economists called the dollar's position an exorbitant privilege, and the phrase transfers whole: native English is an exorbitant privilege — and an exorbitant limitation. The privilege is that everyone will speak your language. The limitation is that everyone will speak your language. Abroad, the moment you hesitate, the waiter, the colleague, the date switches to English as a courtesy — and the immersion every language learner is promised evaporates on contact. It is genuinely tough to learn a foreign language in a country that keeps practicing its English on you.
Which means the bar is not "get by." For any hope of really learning, you need to listen really freakin' well — well enough that answering in the local language is faster than the switch, well enough that the courtesy never gets triggered. That level is not acquired on arrival; it is prepared. Dictation is that preparation: an investment in your readiness for an early international FIRE, made in the one skill the reserve language will otherwise never let you build on site.
I learned this the way I learn most things — by accident, while doing something else. Beneath the romances and the U-turns, I was scouting countries for a FIRE residence: real geographical arbitrage, the hard-to-realize passion of retiring young. Whether you go fat or lean, the arithmetic points the same direction — out. Even Munich looked like an economic oasis compared to Boston, and Munich is not where arbitrage hunters go bragging.
Check the taxes, though. I wasn't thinking about them at the time — you can work around a surprising amount with margin loans against the portfolio, but "I'll structure around it later" is how arbitrage becomes a story you tell instead of a return you keep.
Here is what the FIRE spreadsheets don't have a row for: in the country where you land, the language is the difference between arbitraging a place and merely occupying it. The expat who never leaves English lives in a kind of extended airport — comfortable, serviced, and sealed. The one who can hear the local language conducts himself differently in every room that counts, and is treated accordingly. A language is the one asset on the journey that appreciates with use, survives every currency regime, and cannot be confiscated at the border.
The FIRE journey also solves the language learner's oldest problem — sustaining the practice — because the motive isn't a resolution, it's a residence. You are not learning Portuguese to feel cultured. You are learning it because your shortlist has Lisbon on it and your visa has a renewal date. That is a reason of the durable species; the sessions do themselves differently when the language is load-bearing.
And the journey supplies the dead time: the flight segments, the trains between candidate cities, the waiting rooms of immigration offices. Listening practice needs your ears, your hands, and nothing else. Start with the listening — it is the foundation the rest of the asset is built on, and the part no phrasebook can fake for you in the rooms where it counts.