Language Study: What is a foreign language worth?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-study

by tokenadult • 12 years ago

46 52 12 years ago

tatqx• 12 years ago

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?

groovy2shoes• 12 years ago

Yeah, Spanish is pretty easy for Anglophones. Afrikaans is super easy for Anglophones to learn also. The syntax and pragmatics of Afrikaans are nearly the same as English. There are some new words, sounds, and orthography to pick up, but honestly the orthography is the hardest part. There aren't nearly as many resources to learn Afrikaans as Spanish, though.

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.

nerfhammer2• 12 years ago

also Afrikaans is the only other Indoeuropean language without noun genders!

gordaco2• 12 years ago

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.

WildUtah2• 12 years ago

"just how many vowels do you have?"

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.

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

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".

WildUtah2• 12 years ago

Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common language based on common Indo-European roots.

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.

bodyfour2• 12 years ago

Esperanto has two problems: Spanish and English. Spanish was what Esperanto wanted to be, English did what esperanto wanted to do.

Vlaix• 12 years ago

Odd you'd say that. Though I'm not a native English speaker, I found Spanish to be among the hardest languages I've come across (more so than Modern Greek or German), and I come from a French background with wide knowledge across all of the Romance board. I'd expect a English speaker to struggle even more than I did.

(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.)

bodyfour2• 12 years ago

English has some good features:

  * 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

Its too bad the spelling and pronunciation are such disasters.

wprl• 12 years ago

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

nwenzel• 12 years ago

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.

hrktb• 12 years ago

To play the devil's advocate, there is an opportunity cost to your child learning a new language, which is he can't communicate and understand mildly complex things in preschool until he learns the language. During that time he could have read stories about things he never imagined, learned piano and understand music playing, learned to swim or discovered storytelling etc.

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.

sentenza3• 12 years ago

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.

MarkTee• 12 years ago

Polymaths like Da Vinci and Bacon disagree with you (however rare they may be).

gsz• 12 years ago

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.

EGreg• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

gamegoblin• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

>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• 12 years ago

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

sosuke• 12 years ago

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/

gruseom• 12 years ago

Learn another language, gain another soul.

csense2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

csense2• 12 years ago

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.

gordaco2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

contingencies5• 12 years ago

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.

kiiski• 12 years ago

It's not like you would just automatically get more money because you speak another language; you have to go work somewhere where they need you to do so.

contingencies5• 12 years ago

Right. This is my point. In ten years, working across three or four continents, and many countries, I have never actually seen this 'need'.

astrange• 12 years ago

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.

contingencies5• 12 years ago

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.

ronaldx• 12 years ago

This is not immediately obvious, even if given your word.

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?

contingencies5• 12 years ago

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.

ttflee• 12 years ago

Mandarin, technically, refers to the standardised accent of Northern Chinese. If by Mandarin you mean spoken and written Simplified Chinese, of course, that would be difficult. Many Chinese students have to struggle for a decade on it, too, not to mention the required ancient Chinese in textbooks.

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.

contingencies5• 12 years ago

Mandarin, technically, refers to the standardised accent of Northern Chinese.

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.

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.

crazygringo• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

bliker• 12 years ago

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.

camillomiller• 12 years ago

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.

stbarnes• 12 years ago

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.

kleiba• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

return0• 12 years ago

That s not entirely true. English is the lingua Franca, you need it if you are going in any competitive field. And it's not like you learn it the British way, my English is half-British, half-Hollywood. Also with so many different languages in Europe, choosing a language to learn can determine the country you will be moving to.

logicallee• 12 years ago

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.

jasonkester• 12 years ago

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.

gregholmberg• 12 years ago

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?

Language Study: What is a foreign language worth?

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