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In Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel, Night School, there’re two references to language learning.

The bad guy listens to language tapes for 20 minutes every night to improve his Spanish. He lies in bed wearing headphones, “listening, repeating, learning, until his brain got tired and he fell asleep.” He does this because he cannot expect his future workers to learn English.

Later in the book, Reacher addresses a group of Germans. He asks them, “You speak English?” When one of them says yes, Reacher responds, “You ever wonder why? Why you speak my language and I don’t speak yours?”