Another colleague and friend in Israel, Eran introduced me this… the most hilarious language joke I have ever read.
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The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English
will be the official language of the EU rather than German,which was the
other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s government
conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement, and has
accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would be known as “EuroEnglish”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will
make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in
favor of the “k”. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have
one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the
troublesome “ph” will be replaced with the “f”. This will make words
like “fotograf” 20% shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted
to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have
always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the
horible mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful, and they
should go away.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing
“th” with “z”, and “w” with “v”. During ze fifz year, ze unesesary “o”
kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou”, and similar changes vud of kors
be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no
mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech
ozer. ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!!! And zen ve vil take over ze
VORLD!!!
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It seems this has been introduced in a lot of sites already. Here is a very good article discussing this matter.
I once read (Japanese book) that the biggest reason which made English the standard language is more of its openness which makes people from various backgrounds communicate easily, than the side effect of British empire once dominated the globe. I am not sure this is correct, but no reason to oppose. More, in this context Japanese is a perfect example of a complete oppositeness to English. Everybody who communicates in Japanese must put him or her in a certain vertical position before starting the conversation. Customer/Supplier, Senior/Junior, Older/Younger, almost every relationship has a certain difference in the position : they are never at the same level. And since this is explicitly shown in the language level (for example the “I” for the senior and the “I” for junior is a different word) we are almost always aware of which one is in the stronger position, it is very rare to cross that boundary. Imagine a guy whose younger brother(weaker) happened to be a customer of him(stronger). These two will have a weird feeling when they have to talk to each other in front of others. Quite different than English, ha…
This might explain part of the reason why we see so few English-speaking Japanese. I guess it has nothing to do with Japanese DNA or Asian culture or sushi. The more you are used to communicate in Japanese in the traditional sense (rather vertical relationship), the more you are far away from the English world(rather horizontal relationship), difficult to master this language. So this quote from the above linked article doesn’t seem to apply to us much..

For one, English is one of the most linguistically developed languages of the world, i.e. its basics are very easy to learn.