I disagree. Korean society idolizes the English language to the point that it's usually taught as a main secondary language starting from elementary school, and you pretty much can't get into any half decent Korean university if your English sucks. Of course, if you don't get into a nice university, you don't get a nice job because no big company paying the big bucks wants to hire you.

It's like the equivalent of saying "if you don't know English AND Spanish/French you're not getting into any university but the local shitty state/community college, which means low paying jobs for you!" in the US. And the society overall is so obsessed with English that they're using it as the main language in a lot of places (works great when half the audience doesn't know the language well, right?). I heard a broadcast of one commencement speech at some Korean university where some guy just talked in this horrible broken English that even I couldn't understand beyond a word or two (and I'm a native speaker and can usually understand people with heavy accents). Way to go! Isn't the point of a language to um, like, communicate? Not to alienate your non-English speaking but all fluent-in-Korean audience for the sake of attempting to look trendy by speaking English (but making a fool of yourself in the process..).

Of course, unless they get a job requiring English, or move to an English-speaking country, most people forget all they learned about English.

To top that off, given that I'm Korean, I get to deal with these (mostly) twats with no lives with a horrible command of English waay too often. Too many times I've been asked by friends of my mom who want me to tutor their poor kid cause I was in gifted programs since forever and have spectacular SAT verbal/writing scores. And I don't see anyone making any comments like yours about my excellent command of the Korean language (complete with slang) despite having been born and raised in the US. Or conversational French and Spanish. And Java. And Ruby. And C++. :p I respect any and all polyglots, regardless of where they were raised and what they know. But I just really felt the need to point out a couple of things.

Honestly, I should quit my job and give up coding to go teach English to the kids of the rich overseas. A couple hundred bucks an hour? Sheeeeesh. I already had to teach English to a couple of my cousins that came over last summer...the older one was considered to be one of the best English speakers in her expensive and elite private middle school but I honestly couldn't call it anything more than broken English at best.