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gwern comments on Learn A New Language! - Less Wrong
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That's essentially how I learned English. You need to add an important caveat: it takes about 10-20 years.
(ETA: on second thought, I'm maybe overstating it - what I wanted to point out is that it may take a long time to learn a new language without immersion - but that it's doable at all is good news.)
Learning languages is expensive; I'm not sure it's a good idea at all for ordinary English speakers, and I see a distinct lack of calculation in this post or other comments.
If you plan to never, ever live in a non-English-speaking place, yeah, learning languages other than English is not terribly useful. Anyway, the utility function is not up for grabs, so if the reason I'm learning Irish is because I want to considerations of usefulness are not too relevant.
Living in the same country you were born in is the lot of something like 90% of humanity and usually has been, and English-speaking may well embrace more territory than you might guess.
For example, when I visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 2005, I was shocked at how many natives spoke English and how well.
And just today, while finishing a Wikipedia experiment, I was surprised to note that the smaller German Wikipedia was sending something like half as many visits to my (English) DNB FAQ as the larger English Wikipedia. (Although I just checked, and contrary to what I thought, the German entry wasn't specifying that my page is in English, which is likely inflating click-throughs; I've added an 'Englisch' warning, so we'll see how things change after 100 days or so. Good to know this for context in my experiment, too.)
As a Dutch person with a German girlfriend, I'm in both countries quite often. It's common knowledge in both countries that the Dutch are good at English, and it's common knowledge in Germany that the Germans are not very good at English. Apart from that, fully English courses, or just English lecture slides, are common in our exact sciences university. In Germany apparently not so much, although I don't have first hand experience.
Looking up actual numbers, this seems to be somewhat true. The English Language in Europe wikipedia page has a nice bar graph and map, created from data from an EU survey
In the Netherlands, 87% indicate that they speak English. In Germany it's 51% and in Belgium it's 52%. Across all of Europe, it's 51%.
Oh, and if you're ever back in the Netherlands, you're welcome to drop by :)
Probably, but I doubt this figure will stay this high much longer, especially for people born in countries living economic hard times such as Ireland. (Also, people who stay in their home country tend to get lower-status jobs than those who emigrate.)
But it might be further away from where you are. Most people emigrating from Ireland and Britain end up in North America or Australia just because they don't have decent-enough German or French to try mainland Europe.
Northern Europe is unusual in that respect. Staying a few days in Paris without decent French was awful, so I can't even imagine how it would be to stay there for a longer period without learning French. (And while I never had any kind of language problems in the Netherlands, I still guess that if I looked for a job there it'd be a helluva lot harder to find one than if I could speak Dutch.)
Well, the kind of people who are likely to be interested in stuff like DNB are likely to already be able to read English, wherever they grew up (if anything, I'm surprised that lots of people read the de.wiki article on GNB rather than the en.wiki one in the first place); but this needn't generalize to most two-digit-IQ people, and if you live in a country you'll have to interact with them too.
Statistics. My guess is that the percentage for Belgium would be a lot higher if you excluded the part that speaks French.
So to followup the experiment: I checked Google Analytics now and was surprised to see that after I added the English warning, late May - early June 2012 saw a big spike in traffic from the German Wikipedia to the DNB FAQ, many times the daily average. Presumably this must have been from some article in the German media on dual n-back.
Unfortunately, the data ends at 10 June 2012... because that was when I moved to Amazon S3 to save on hosting costs, breaking all my existing redirects (Amazon S3 doesn't do .htaccess or redirects) - and the German article was pointing to a redirect. D'oh!
Anyway, there's no obvious sudden drop on 20 May 2012, but the big spike contaminates all the relevant days.
I guess I'll wait another ~100 days and see what happens now that everything should be working properly...
Update: traffic has still not recovered: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/Analytics%20www.gwern.net%20User%20Defined%2020120131-20121130.pdf
I infer this means the English warning is indeed deterring a lot of traffic.
You seem to imply that if you want to some day live in a non-English-speaking place, you should learn languages now. No, only if you know where you'll eventually want to live should you learn that language now (and maybe you should wait for immersion, which is easier).
Learning a second language is likely to make it easier to learn a third language afterwards, and so on.
Yes, but I think the expected value of correctly guessing where you want to live is higher than the value from this effect.
But I think you're just rationalizing. Compare this comment of yours to the earlier one. Are they really talking about the same thing? Are either of them responsive to Gwern?
I meant something like “if you think you might live in an A-speaking country you should learn A, but even if you think you might live abroad but you're not sure where, it's better to learn some language A than no foreign language at all, because even if you end up living in a B-speaking country, learning B as an adult who has never learnt an additional language before will be harder than if you had already learnt a foreign language A when younger.”
Gwern's point is that learning a language other than English is expensive and useless, and I'm pointing out cases when it's not useless (and, in the great-grandparent, that I want to do something expensive just for the hell of it it's my own business -- going to the cinema once a week would also be expensive and useless, for example). Or am I missing something?
Gwern didn't use the word "useless." If it's useless, the magnitude of expense is irrelevant. The important thing is to compare costs to benefits. Listing benefits without quantifying them doesn't contribute to this. Incidentally, the particular benefit you mentioned was in the original post.
Not necessarily: there are such things as terminal values. The utility function is not up for grabs.
Aren't there lateral benefits to learning something as complex as a new language? The level of mental focus and commitment required must have cognitive rewards and I would think any level of cognitive improvement would be of great value.
In order to learn any language, it requires a certain level of immersion in cultural concepts/perspectives outside of your own. Broadening cultural awareness and gaining new perspectives certainly contributes to an individual's ability to see the world with increased clarity.
It seems to me that measuring the worth of learning anything in terms of how directly one might make use of it cannot measure its total value.
Indeed. “It's expensive to learn and it has no obvious immediate practical benefits” applies to lots¹ of skills/knowledge, so it seems silly to me to single any of them out.
I can't say I will never live in a non-English speaking place, but since I have no particular plans to at the moment, I have no reason to learn any particular language out of hundreds, either.
As I said elsewhere, learning a language is likely to make it easier to learn another one later on; also, some languages are more influential than others, so if you choose to learn German or French (if you're in Europe) or Spanish (in America) you have a non-negligible probability of finding the very language you chose useful in the future.
So, the plan is: invest 1000 hours now, so that when you actually need to learn a language you only have to invest 800 hours then?
Anyway, I hear you saying that you have intrinsic motivation here, so these kind of calculations aren't really relevant to you, which I understand.
Out of curiosity, and related to what you said upthread: are you learning Irish?
Yes. (I took an introductory course in UCD when I was on an exchange there last year, the course on the BBC website, and now I'm taking Gaeilge gan Stró! - Lower Intermediate Level from ranganna.com.)
Cool! I don't know that website; is it any good?
Má bhéadh aon suim agat chun cleactadh Gaeilge a dheanamh, chuir PM dom! Ní féidir liom é a labhairt go líofa, ach tá mé ceart go leor.