(Note: I actually wanted to post this as a comment, not an answer, but for some reason it doesn't seem to do anything when I try—simply does not react.)
FJDU, you are missing the fact that in Chinese, you do not really say English language/people, since Chinese does not have a way of morphologically deriving adjectives from nouns. What you really say is England language and England people. Different languages derive words from each other in different ways; in English, an adjective can be derived from country (and similar) names, and these adjectives can then, like so many other, be used as nouns. If you simply make a noun out of an adjective that means ‘of England’, it makes sense that that will most often refer to either the people of England or the language of England.
There are languages where simple adjectives, nouns for people, and nouns for languages have three different forms (Irish and Scottish Gaelic work like this, and I have some vague memory of reading somewhere that Turkish does too?); there are languages where two are the same and one is different (English is partly one of these, at least for some languages/countries; Germanic languages in general share the same distribution of adjective + language being the same and people being a different word; Finnish has a slightly different model where adjective + people are the same word, but language is simply the name of the country/place itself, underived); and there are languages where all three are the same (such as Chinese).
There is no real ‘reason’ as such for all this. It is just part of what makes languages different from each other.
Your assumption seems to be that the ambiguity your respondents complain about could be resolved if only you could choose the correct pronoun: this or that.
It is more likely that the anaphoric this or that standing alone are inherently ambiguous if they refer back to a long stretch of discourse. The problem can be alleviated if you add a noun: This criticism shows ... This concept has not yet ... . That assumption has proved ... .
For more information you might want to do a search on "the unattended anaphoric this". For example: Attended/unattended this in academic student writing .
Best Answer
This is a typical awkward wording I see in Japanese-English translation.
If you want to use an adverbial phrase, you need something like the following:
I suggest something like:
A related awkward structure is the following:
Literally, this says only that Bob is similar to John and that Bob lives in Tokyo, but nothing about where John lives. If both live in Tokyo, then:
Or something along those lines