Ubiquity of Other Languages

Whenever you do a web search for anything technical, or you look down the list of the latest bookmarks in del.icio.us you see languages other than English, and sometimes it's the majority of results. On the front page at del.icio.us right now I see quite a bit of Japanese, some Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French, and German.

Cybertech, or any Film Noir type of Sci Fi tends to show people speaking English most of the time but with lots of Japanese around, especially on signs (and this is from the American branch of it). The cities always look like either Tokyo or Chinatown in New York. I wonder when people started thinking of these particular Asian cultures as being the future. I've certainly felt that way since at least 1987. I guess it was that Japan was this mystical place that created videos games and new electronics.

I wonder if I'll ever start to recognize enough of these languages to have a basic understanding of it, enough to just get by. Could that happen just by seeing the context? That's how babies learn, right? I can already partially understand written French by pretending it's spanish and taking the context into account. I needed to read usenet postings in French while I was learning ocaml. My geek friends in Bolivia used to read the programming books in English even though they could barely hold a conversation with me in English.