The most salient point I got from the article: an increasing number of people learning English are using it only to speak to others who do not speak it natively. A couple of illustrations:

- I have witnessed one student from Hong Kong and one student from Beijing use English to bridge the gap between Cantonese and Mandarin (as well as pen & paper).

- My French is very poor, so the only people that I can converse with in French are those with a really bad English accent. I can well imagine that English is worse, what with its crazy spelling and idioms.