
Language Study: What is a foreign language worth? - tokenadult
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-study
======
nwenzel
I realize the article is pro-multilingual, but I disagree with the notion that
time spent learning a foreign language is time not spent learning another
subject.

My son was in Spanish immersion preschool from age 2 until 3 years 4 months.
He can speak and understand Spanish and understands that he speaks a language
that my wife and I don't. Then we moved and put him in Mandarin/English
bilingual school. He's 2.5 months into the program and can already count,
follow basic instructions, and make basic requests.

Learning a language at that age has basically been a free layer of learning
added on top of his education and growth. To him, it's not even "learning"
it's just talking and playing and singing.

There's no opportunity cost at that age to stacking blocks with English
instruction or some other language. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that
time in our kids' lives by immersing them in another language?

Of course it could just be that my son is the smartest kid in the whole world.
That's probably true, too.

~~~
sentenza
I think the training you child recieves is an interesting combination and I
don't want to criticize you on that. What I want to add are some observations
I've made in the past about myself and others around me (so purely anecdotal).

I speak three languages fluently and a bunch of others to varying degree. I
also hold a PhD in Physics. What I've noticed is that my brain manages very
well if I have prolonged periods of intense "sciencing" and it also works well
if I take some time to learn languages.

However, if I try to do half a day of thinking about algorithms and then half
a day of language learning, I will get a headache and slight nausea! Might be
that this only happens to me because of some "manufacturing error", but I've
tried it repeatedly and it invariably happens.

This has lead me to form the following, highly unproven, high-level working
heuristic about the brain: The brain might be just like the rest of our body.
You can train to be a weightlifter, or you can train to be a marathon runner.
If you do both over the course of your life, you can become good at both, but
you'll probably never become the worlds best at any of the two.

If you do intense training on both without a resting period in between, you'll
hurt yourself.

So that's my weird theory, for what it's worth.

That said, I think your child has a lot to gain from the broad knowledge he
receives. I can tell you from experience that this is the age of
interdisciplinarity, and it's a lot of fun.

~~~
gsz
I also speak three languages, and I'm learning another two. I'm also a hacker.
I find programming and foreign languages highly complimentary. In both cases
I'm supposed to communicate ideas in a specific vocabulary and grammar.

Also, my two geeky pre-teen sons equally like learning Python and French (on
Duolingo).

Of course, I learn languages because I'm interested in the culture of the
people who speak those languages. In the same way, I learn programming
languages to broaden my way of thinking about computing.

~~~
sentenza
Again, it might very well be that my observations are specific to myself and
my body/brain.

What I'd like to add to my previous post is that the effect appears when I do
both things under heavy load. Especially the language learning method I have
is much more strenuous than what most people use.

Here's what I do: Obviously there are times where I learn the basics of the
language and basic vocabulary. The main part of my learning effort, however,
consists of watching movies/television.

What makes this so hard, is that I start doing so when I have only a very
basic grip on the language, so that I understand very little of the language
I'm trying to absorb. While watching, I force myself to actively try and
understand/infer as much as I can. By this I mean that I touch my cognitive
load limit.

When I'm "fresh", this is realy exhausting. When I mix it with complementary
strenuous work (say, designing a numerical algoritm), it causes headaches and
slight nausea.

I want to stress that this method I use is not suitable for everybody and I'd
really recommend against trying to do it for the first foreign language. The
reason I resort to it is that I am more of a speech person than a written text
person and I am also somewhat lazy regarding textbook language study.

It might also be useful to note that, while my method takes less learning time
than using a book or working with a tandem partner, it requires much more
reconvalescence. So my net learning speed might be on par or even slower than
the speed of somebody using duolingo or doing an advanced university course.

------
EGreg
This is so silly!

Thanks to my ability to speak Russian, I am able to employ a team of Russian
speaking developers all over the world, and therefore build things more
efficiently and for less money than I would hiring local developers.

That right there created a huge amount of value not just for me but all the
users of our apps, and made the whole thing possible.

~~~
duopixel
This. Most people are unfortunately unaware that having a unique skill set (be
it a second language or anything else) puts them at an advantage if applied in
tandem. However, you often have to invent your own job.

------
crazygringo
It may be a 2% premium on average, but in the US, it's probably more like 0%
for the vast majority of people, and quite a sizeable increase for a very
small number. So the average isn't very meaningful, when it hides such extreme
variation.

I know a _lot_ of professional people here in the US who are fluent in two,
three, even four languages. Only one of them actually uses a second language
as a part of their job. I mean, how many jobs require significant
international communication with people who don't speak English? Not many.

(Being from a non-English speaking country, and learning English, is a whole
different thing though.)

~~~
ckoepp
> I mean, how many jobs require significant international communication with
> people who don't speak English? Not many.

Well, there is more to a language than just words and grammar, right? Learning
a language is also a crash course in terms of cultural studies. If you happen
to be in contact with other cultures this might be quite helpful to deal with
colleagues and/or customers.

We're living in a world where a majority of people communicate. Cultural
understanding is more important than ever and even though English seems to be
the global language, everyone should be willing to learn at least one foreign
languages and basic concepts of other cultures with it.

There's also a small test about this: if you happen to be in a foreign country
just try to learn the local phrases for "Hello" and "Thank you". Use it when
checking in at the hotel, eating in restaurants and dealing with local people
- you'll be amazed what those simple words can archive. It's a sign of respect
and that you made an effort to learn about their culture.

To sum it up: cultural understanding is getting more important as the whole
world (regardless of national borders) communicates. Learning a language comes
with learning about a different culture and reflecting your own. This is an
essential thing when dealing with foreign people and everybody should have
basic knowledge about it.

------
camillomiller
Putting a thing like language learning in terms of ROI is pretty moronic. Ok,
that's a simplified vision to understand if time spent learning a foreign
language is actually well spent. What isn't really taken into consideration,
though, are the indirect cultural advantages of learning a language.

That's an experience that goes beyond the act of learning grammar rules and a
new vocabulary. It's a complex process made of many different intellectual and
cultural enhancements that help you get the world in a better perspective, and
in the end gives you an unquantifiable advantage over the mono-lingual.

Apart from that, I agree that Spanish may not be the better choice in the US,
since the position of superiority the non-Latin still has when it come to
fluency for professional purposes. Even for the Romans it made no sense to
learn the language of the inferior populations they had around them, and
you'll know how it went down. Learning Saxon languages certainly had a bad ROI
back then.

Furthermore, if you really had to follow this skewed line of ROI-based
reasoning, where the hell is Chinese? I have the hunch that, as an US-born
American, knowing the pretty obscure language of one of the biggest traders in
the world might give you a pretty big advantage.

------
kleiba
Being from Europe myself, I can't help but smile at this article. It's such an
American way of thinking! "Return of investment in dollars", lol :-)

When I started learning foreign languages, English being one of them, it was
because I was interested in different cultures and to be able to experience
the world at large in a more sophisticated way. Never in a million years would
it have occurred to me that I should do it to boost my career.

~~~
maurycy
Not to dismiss your experience, but The Economist actually is a British
journal.

------
gamegoblin
I speak Spanish/French/German and to be completely honest, the majority of
their usage to me is chatting up girls from those countries I happen to meet.

I've never met a programmer who didn't speak English better than I spoke their
language.

That being said, the ability to chat up girls, and the fact that I just love
languages, makes the endeavor entirely worth it to me...

~~~
enraged_camel
>>I speak Spanish/French/German and to be completely honest, the majority of
their usage to me is chatting up girls from those countries I happen to meet.

I'm currently single. You just sold me on it, man.

~~~
akavi
Be careful about causality there; I'm conversational in 6 languages and am
hopeless with women.

------
stbarnes
The article uses misleading numbers. Sure, that 2% bonus is worth $60k if you
compound it over 40 years. But that number is almost _irrelevant_. What's
relevant is the _opportunity cost_. If you spent that time (likely hundred or
thousands of hours) working on more valuable skills, you'd likely get much
more than 2%. Put another way, the value of that time, when compounded over 20
years, is enormous, probably more enormous than $60k. To compound the value
gained from language but not compound the value of the time is extremely
misleading - either use present values for both, or use comparable future
values for both.

------
jasonkester
Sounds like somebody's measuring the wrong thing.

Sure, we'll grant you that foreign languages don't help your male pattern
baldness, nor will they get you out of trouble with those unpaid parking
tickets. But that's not why you learn them.

You learn them so that you can sling your hammock on a river boat going up the
Amazon from Iquitos and spend a good week getting to know a bunch of locals
for whom that's the only transport to or from their village.

You learn them so that when you get a flat tire on your rented motorbike in
Trang Provence and the local fisherman stops to help, you can share a few
words of conversation and he'll invite you back to his stilt house amid the
mangroves to meet his family and share a meal of dried fish and seaweed over
rice.

I've done three laps of this world now, and can safely say that the best
experiences I had were the ones interacting with local folks in remote areas
that didn't really meet many westerners. Hell, I spent a month in China and by
far the two most interesting and enjoyable days were the ones where I had the
good fortune to be shown around by friends who were fluent.

Speaking English, I could pull off a tourist bus to the Great Wall. Speaking
Chinese, I was eating Bao Dze from a little unmarked hole in the wall on a
back street in Beijing after watching the sunrise over a part of the city you
don't normally get to see.

So yeah, I'm not sure how many dollars I got out of any of that. But if
anything, I wish I'd spent _more_ time learning foreign languages.

------
tatqx
Totally makes sense, but Spanish is still one of the easiest languages for
learn for English speakers. So if you are planning to learn a new language, do
give Spanish a try. One of the best books for learning Spanish is - Madrigal's
Magic Key to Spanish. French is a little more difficult, and German is way
more difficult. Probably that's another reason for the difference in the
returns over time?

~~~
gordaco
I'm Spanish and I'm curious about what you said. I feel that English has much
easier grammar than Spanish (just think of the verb conjugation in both
languages!), but much more difficult phonetics (just how many vowels do you
have? Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"?
Half-kidding only); so I can write in English far better than I can speak. I
expected that a native English speaker learning Spanish would have the same
imbalance sensations that I had, just reversed.

By the way, I found that learning German was far easier than English. I wish I
had time to keep doing it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"?

They're called schwa and wedge. This is actually a discussion I've had (not
particularly fruitfully); schwa, being a reduced vowel, is sort of notionally
only available in unstressed syllables. So you'd want to say a stressed
syllable uses the wedge. But indeed they don't seem to be pronounced
differently for many people, or at least not differently enough that there's
an obvious answer. Merriam-Webster seems to use schwa even for stressed
syllables like "stuff".

------
gordaco
Too bad it's anglocentric, I expected something a little more generic. As a
non-English native speaker, a can assure you that the ROI of learning English
is _much_ higher than two percent.

Aside from that, I'm really sad to read about what to study in terms of what's
it worth economically, instead of culturally. Then again, when it comes to
studying, I'm too much of an idealist.

~~~
pjmlp
Sure, but there are parts in the world where people do favour other languages
as lingua franca.

For example, I had more luck with German in Eastern Europe than English.

As a non-English speaker, I enjoy being able to speak 7 languages, although
not fully fluent in all of them.

You won't find many people even bothering to learn English, if you go outside
big cities in most countries.

------
csense
I took two years of a foreign language in high school. I only learned a little
bit of vocabulary, and conjugation in only a couple of tenses. I don't think
it much improved my ability to communicate with non-English speakers (and
anyway, I haven't encountered any, so it's kind of irrelevant).

Then I had to take more foreign language in college to satisfy a graduation
requirement. I'd already had it in high school; I'd already learned that I
wasn't good at it and didn't enjoy it. Me sitting through that college class
was an utter waste of time and effort for both me and the professor.

Not everybody is good at, or cares about, learning languages. If a student's
had a few months of foreign language instruction at some point in their life,
you shouldn't force them to take more.

~~~
Dewie
Now replace "foreign language" with "math" and consider that many have spoken
out about how the typical mathematics curriculum is backwards and gives the
wrong impression about what math is really about.

I hate learning languages in a school setting. Yet I have gained a minor
interest in languages now many years after high school, and can appreciate
learning it on my own premises.

~~~
csense
An interesting analogy, so I upvoted you. But I would argue that foreign
language and math are in some sense _opposites_.

If I forget that the quadratic formula is the string of symbols "(-b +-
sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a)", I can hack around that gap in any number of ways.
Re-deriving the formula, or solving a specific quadratic equation by
completing the square, factoring, or graphical/numerical methods would all be
viable solutions.

If I forget the word for "take", or I don't remember the sequence of
characters that turns the base word for "take" into "you (plural) took",
there's no way I can reconstruct that information from other knowledge.

It's easy to learn things in math because the new things are a natural
extension of what you learn.

Foreign languages are memorizing a lot of words and conjugations which don't
fit together in any meaningful way.

For me, it seems like math is much easier to learn because the connectedness
of everything means the entropy content of new material is very low, and any
particular hole in your memory is of little consequence since you can easily
fill it back in. But I can see where other people whose minds work differently
might be scared by the nearly infinite rabbit hole you can get into in
mathematics by starting somewhere and going related places, and might do much
better with memorization of lists of words and conjugations.

I've also heard that foreign language gets a little easier and more connected
once you have some critical mass of vocabulary and grammar, but I've never
been able to stand the pain of the early stage long enough to get to that
point.

------
bliker
I heard the podcast and skimmed this article. I found that their findings and
conclusions are totally irrelevant for me and I think for many people in my
situation/location.

I am from Slovakia, where you are never more than 3 hours by car from some
border. Sometimes the neighbors speak similar language like Polish, sometimes
you stumble into totally different like Hungarian. And not the mention the
minorities in Slovakia.

Now I am living in Denmark, that is not much different So the list of
languages that I yearly get in contact with is: Danish, German, Polish,
Hungarian, plus languages I speak: Slovak, Czech and English.

I can see the profit of learning any one of them.

------
wprl
I use my undergraduate Italian to find recipes for foods and liqueurs on
Italian Google, among other things.

------
logicallee
The opportunity cost of not learning more code for everyone here is really,
really high. In whatever time it takes to learn just 1 single foreign
language, you can add +$20K per year to your salary FOREVER. ($60K goes to
$80K, $80K to $100K, $100K to $120K, $120K to $140K, $140K to $160K, $160K to
$180K).

In that sense foreign languages have a huge negative value as an investment -
but then, so does reading literature.

------
contingencies
I'm a native English speaker who learned Mandarin 10+ years ago, and I can
honestly say it has not added a cent to my income as a programmer.

~~~
astrange
Do you work on projects that get Chinese localizations? It might help to work
for a large or non-web company, so that you have a hope of selling into China
instead of having a local company clone your product and sell theirs instead.

My Japanese and other language skills are very useful for QAing our app's
localization, even though we have an unquestionably professional translation
team to do it. In the end I understand the meaning of the app's text better
than them, since I worked on the actual engineering.

~~~
contingencies
_Do you work on projects that get Chinese localizations?_

Yes, I do.

 _It might help to work for a large or non-web company_

True, but then I'd be earning less. Hence my original point.

 _so that you have a hope of selling into China instead of having a local
company clone your product and sell theirs instead._

This bit confuses me and sounds like common naysaying. Yes, China isn't known
for its innovation at the moment (though it does exist) but then neither is
the UK, Taiwan or Korea, and you don't hear people endlessly repeating that
yarn in their direction.

------
gruseom
Learn another language, gain another soul.

------
sosuke
I love the use of compound interest to increase the value, and I've never had
the chance to reference an xkcd comic until now
[http://xkcd.com/947/](http://xkcd.com/947/)

------
gregholmberg
One happy benefit of being able to read Russian is being able to use Yandex as
a second or third point of view when researching a topic primarily through
Internet search.

There also seems to be variation between Wikipedia articles in different
languages that I would not ascribe to incompleteness. Does generally-accepted
cultural "truth" about a topic or incident really differ so much?

