Bill Gates does not speak any foreign language
The most intimate admission made by Bill Gates during his third AMA on Reddit today may have been, "I feel quite foolish that I don't know any other languages." I received A's in my Latin and Greek classes in high school, and I suppose it helped my vocabulary, but I really wish I knew French, Arabic, or Chinese. Gates comes from a large multilingual family, yet he is monolingual and can only speak English well. This is one of the interesting facts about Bill Gates.
His enthusiasm for learning French is intriguing. It's not like this language has somehow managed to become ubiquitous. Does Gates enjoy the sound of it? Could he have thought that speaking French would increase his seductive appeal? All he would say is that French is "the simplest" of his three-goal languages.
There is a basic assumption that everyone will speak English in American corporations. The co-founder of Microsoft, though, expressed surprise at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to a second language. Mark Zuckerberg, he added, "amazingly mastered Mandarin and conducted a Q&A with Chinese pupils." The utterly cynical will assert that Zuckerberg has two major motivations: a Chinese-American wife and a desperate desire to win over the Chinese government, which is not a fan of Facebook.
