Should the Vietnamese startup ecosystem use English only?

A recent uprising topic in Vietnam these days is using only English for startup community? The topic was raised by some of the most influencers in Vietnam Tech startup industry and the responses are also quite positive, that Vietnamese should use only English in some of the community sites (Launch) in order to tackle more investment opportunities in the regions like South East Asia aiming toward bigger goals.

Many people also argued that forcing people to use English is not a smart move because each country communication channel should have their own language identities. I know that English is a great way to connect to the world, but Asia is quite different from the rest, each country and culture has its own way/style/procedure to do business and language happens to be one of them, that’s also the reason why foreigners need to study about culture gap between West and East before doing business in Asia.

The question lies among many others that is it the best way to force people to switch entirely to English even though it sounds like a good idea at first?

In my opinion, a healthy startup community needs good communication regardless of language, “The English only” thing may hurt some people who might not be able to communicate well in English (not anybody has chance to master their English in Vietnam). To make people better at English, we need more than just forcing all communicating channels into a foreign language entirely, because it may go against the original purposes of these channels, to connect all Vietnamese startup people together. What we really need here is to change people perception about the importance of learn another language, or learn to communicate to the world. We also need to improve the education system (which is one of the hardest things in Vietnam) to help people learn language more proficiently and create more platforms like e-learning. Thus, hey can self-teach to learn new language skills without any barriers.

For your information, Vietnam has more than 10 years of English education from high school to college but it’s super weak. Most of students graduating from university can barely speak English at fluent level. That’s the result of many wasted years of learning only grammar correcting, if they focus more on other communications skills such as speaking, writing or listening, it can a big game changing for Vietnam. They also need to adapt new English learning method from the world, it would be a huge universal access for Vietnamese student to learn English effectively. That’s my thought on the problem, what do you think if you are an Asian that has English as mother tongue language or second language.