dugancm comments on Insufficiently Awesome - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Cayenne 19 April 2011 07:28PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (91)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 03:33:25AM *  18 points [-]

Actually, if you're an adult English speaker, learning foreign languages is probably not worth its opportunity cost. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to learn a language well enough to do anything useful or productive with it, or even just to be able to talk to native speakers in a way that won't be annoyingly incompetent.

What's more, for just about any language there are huge numbers of native speakers who speak professional-level English, including natively bilingual kids of immigrants, so you're not developing any rare and precious combination of skills. (There are exceptions, such as e.g. knowledge of some languages combined with a security clearance that's hard to obtain if you're not a native citizen, but they are few and far between.)

Of course, if you find learning languages a fun hobby, go for it. But unless it's a greater source of fun and enjoyment than other things you might be doing, it's quite pointless. (And I say that as someone who can find his way around in at least five different languages.)

Comment author: dugancm 20 April 2011 09:11:28AM *  2 points [-]

for just about any language there are huge numbers of native speakers who speak professional-level English

Exception: Sign Languages, though they have relatively small populations.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 20 April 2011 09:56:36PM 5 points [-]

I haven't seen any statistics, but I suspect that there is a significant number of hearing people born to deaf parents who are natively bilingual in English and various Anglospheric sign languages.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 April 2011 10:09:05PM 2 points [-]

I have met at least one person with this background.

Comment author: dugancm 21 April 2011 12:44:58AM 0 points [-]

On top of that, I expect there are already plenty of non-native, dedicated translators and interpreters for a given language gap. Oops, thank you both.