Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Saragossa.

Coming up. So you want to get ahead in the world. Well, learn English.

It's now become a basic skill like reading, writing and arithmetic. I mean, you can't fly a plane if you don't speak English.

Well, you can, but you'll crash. And how the world's children are picking up their English in the most unlikely of places.

I've played a lot like, but I've probably like a year and now I'll start playing for it.

Yeah.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm going to start with a story because I didn't always speak English.

Here are Peter and Jane.

They like to play.

Up they go.

Up, up, up they go.

I'm about six years old in that recording. I'd only been speaking English for a few months. You can hear the Dutch accent. We, that is my dad, mum's sister and brother, had just moved to Manchester in the UK for my father's work. We spoke Italian and Dutch at home, but we went to the local English school.

There were no special English lessons when we started. We were just expected to learn on the go.

Ahead of that, my sister and I used to pretend we already spoke English. We'd copy the sounds.

Snash-knash-nush-nu, we'd say. That's what English sounded like as a foreign language.

These days, English is my native tongue.

And I often wonder what my life would have been, or who I would have been,

if rather than Manchester, we'd move to Paris or, say, Madrid.

I think I can safely say I probably wouldn't be sitting here in the hot chair

speaking on BBC radio today.

I probably would have had a different accent, perhaps even a different life.

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