Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014

Tenoke

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

ROI in learning a foreign language is low, unless it is English. But if you must, I would say the next best thing to immersive instruction would be to watch spanish hulu as an aid to learning. You'd get real conversions at conversational speeds.

So after gwern pointed out that there is a transcript and I have read it I made a back of the envelope calculation.

Assumptions: According to Wikipedia people with a bachelor's degree or higher make $56078 per year, so about $27 per hour. Learning German increases yearly income by 4% and learning it takes about 750 class hours, according to the foreign service institute. Learning Spanish increases income by 1.4% and takes 600 class hours to learn. If we assume that one class hour costs 11.25$ per hour (by glancing at various prices posted on different sites... (read more)

2Metus12y

Disclaimer: I won't listen to the podcast, because I am boycotting any medium that is not text. Language learning may have extremely low ROI in general but extremely high in special cases. E.g. I would not be surprised by finding that people learning the language of the foreign country they live in increases their subjective wellbeing. Or if people want to work as translators. Or they are investors and are specialising in a region not speaking English as their main language. This almost seems like a fallacy. I might call it "homogenity bias" or "mistaking the average for the whole" just to find out that is already known under a different name and well documented.

2Username12y

Great link. From the cited paper: [...]