Me too, but later I learned a bit of german and latin. The thing is you can fake english easily, like “why use lot word when few do trick” is a totally understandable sentence. Word order is not as stict as in german, no cases, no grammatical genders, verb tenses are mostly optional. Pronunciation is messed up though.

English is a global lingua franca, not just european. And it’s not just because of the american and british influence, but because it’s a relatively easy language.

Also the translator programs are better and better, this is actually a good and fitting usecase of current LLMs. I think we are not far away from the babel fish.

The first 3 characters of barcodes means the country of origin.It won’t tell the nationality of the owner of the factory, but you can see where it was packaged, if there are no other clues it can help. Here is the full list. Basically if the first number is 0, 1 or 2, there is a big chance it’s from the us.