Language Study: What is a foreign language worth?
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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.
My son is right now in the transition phase in a new language, and it's mildly sad to see him struggling with very basic concepts ("can I have these pencils? What is the teacher telling me? why is everyone moving their arms ?") when he otherwise would be learning what's the conductor's role is in an ensemble.
Learning a second language lays the base for learning other things, as learning any of the above would also have oppened doors to to better understand other things. Time is finite and choices have to be made, not everyone might prioritize learning languages as much as other things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm currently single. You just sold me on it, man.
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.
Edited to add: Most Afrikaans speakers will tell you that Afrikaans is a dying language. That didn't stop me -- it's not much different from a programmer picking up Modula-3 just for the fun of it.
By the way, I found that learning German was far easier than English. I wish I had time to keep doing it.
Twenty to twenty-eight. Depends on the accent and dialect. Of course, it can be a different set of twenty-eight in different contexts, depending on accent and dialect.
"Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"?"
Not in Utah.
"English has much easier grammar than Spanish"
I don't really agree. English uses phrasal verbs instead of reflexives and circumlocution in place of most subjunctives, but they're just as complicated.
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".
Turns out that it's dang hard to design anything easier or more accessible to speakers of any European language than Spanish already is. The spelling and pronunciation are already completely regular and predictable. The grammar is straightforward and common to almost all European tongues. The vocabulary is mostly based on Latin with some Arabic variety thrown in, but it's been standardized over the centuries so that a lot of it has a simpler and more natural morphology.
It's a great second language: it's fairly easy, the world's second most widespread tongue, and spoken in warm countries with very friendly natives. Unfortunately, it's not likely to provide you with many lucrative opportunities. Remember, money isn't everything.
(The easiest language being English, due to exposure, extreme alienation by French a few centuries back and overall simplicity for the more casual ranges of speech.)
* Limited number of glyphs is a killer feature for the keyboard age
* No noun genders to remember
* The informal 2nd person ("thou") got chased out of common use centuries ago, along with its verb conjugations
* Reasonably forgiving sentence structure
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In that sense foreign languages have a huge negative value as an investment - but then, so does reading literature.
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.
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.
Since you've listed Mandarin on your CV, you must recognise that it could have been a contributor to a hiring decision. Otherwise, why did you put it there?
Because I am not going to discount a skill someone might find valuable, even if it's only by oft-repeated social wisdom and never borne out in practice.
Your argument is true in the sense that it's impossible to disprove. However, it's pretty weak. Generally, if someone hires you with an interest in your language skills, they will at least mention it in the interview.
Programmers in China are more or less capable to at least read documentations in English, some may even have skills in writing and speaking.
I have heard that learning German language is less paid off because Germans are just damn good at English that they do not always need a German-Chinese translator/interpreter but talk in English during a business conversation.
Sort of. More precisely it refers to the artificially standardized accent derived from northern Chinese that the Chinese government tries to have everyone in official positions use, and broadcasts to the entire population of the country through radio, television and education systems. Whether anyone at all actually speaks it off-air is another matter.
If by Mandarin you mean spoken and written Simplified Chinese, of course, that would be difficult.
I didn't mean that at all, but I do read/write/type.
Many Chinese students have to struggle for a decade on it, too, not to mention the required ancient Chinese in textbooks.
I also read some ancient Chinese, in fact I'm writing a history book about Yunnan using not only ancient Chinese but other language sources (Burmese, Tai, Tibetan, etc.).
Programmers in China are more or less capable to at least read documentations in English, some may even have skills in writing and speaking.
This is all beside the point... programmers everywhere have those skills.
I have heard that learning German language is less paid off because Germans are just damn good at English that they do not always need a German-Chinese translator/interpreter but talk in English during a business conversation.
And this is a tangent. Well, thanks for your input. I'm not sure that I understood it properly, but you seem to have essentially agreed with me.
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?