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danlucraft comments on Learn A New Language! - Less Wrong
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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.
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.