Language Study: What is a foreign language worth?

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.

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.

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?

Again, it might very well be that my observations are specific to myself and my body/brain.

What I'd like to add to my previous post is that the effect appears when I do both things under heavy load. Especially the language learning method I have is much more strenuous than what most people use.

Here's what I do: Obviously there are times where I learn the basics of the language and basic vocabulary. The main part of my learning effort, however, consists of watching movies/television.

What makes this so hard, is that I start doing so when I have only a very basic grip on the language, so that I understand very little of the language I'm trying to absorb. While watching, I force myself to actively try and understand/infer as much as I can. By this I mean that I touch my cognitive load limit.

When I'm "fresh", this is realy exhausting. When I mix it with complementary strenuous work (say, designing a numerical algoritm), it causes headaches and slight nausea.

I want to stress that this method I use is not suitable for everybody and I'd really recommend against trying to do it for the first foreign language. The reason I resort to it is that I am more of a speech person than a written text person and I am also somewhat lazy regarding textbook language study.

It might also be useful to note that, while my method takes less learning time than using a book or working with a tandem partner, it requires much more reconvalescence. So my net learning speed might be on par or even slower than the speed of somebody using duolingo or doing an advanced university course.

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.