Why Learn a New Language?

Learning a new language is really hard and in fact, if you know English, that makes it even harder (read about why I think so here). In addition to the Herculean effort needed to learn a new language, there are multiple good reasons not to learn a new language as well as reasons commonly cited that aren’t great reasons for learning a language. We’ll get these out of the way first.

Reasons NOT to Learn A New Language

English is already the global lingua franca.

English is the de facto language of business, education, scientific research, and so many other domains in so many places: 75 countries and 31 non-sovereign entities (like Hong Kong). And that number is always growing. Just two months ago, to give just one recent example, Algeria (the world’s third-largest Francophone country) announced a switch from French to English in its university programs, in a trend being repeated around the world. Numbers of individual speakers are notoriously hard to pin down, but one widely cited source estimates there are currently as many as 1.5 billion English speakers in the world today, including second-language learners — not far from 20% of the world’s total population. Wherever you go, there will be English speakers. You don’t really need to learn any language other than English.

Machine translation is here.

We’ve been working on it since the 1960s. It didn’t really work that well for decades. Then all of a sudden, machines woke up in the 2000s and now machine translation in its various forms is so good, that it exceeds human translations in some domains. It’s certainly orders of magnitude faster and cheaper. For many language pairs (albeit probably not very common ones), there may not be any humans that can do the job. Say you wanted to go from Walpiri to Farsi in one go, you’d probably have to at least go through English first. And this is just 2023. Just give it say five years and real-time voice-to-voice simultaneous machine translation will not only be nearly indistinguishable from what humans can do but will be widely available and nearly free.

Translated CEO Marco Trombetti has quantified recent progress in machine translation in terms of Time To Edit (TTE), the number of seconds it takes to correct a translation per word of translation. As shown in the graphic below, speeds have gotten steadily better each year. Following these trends, machine translation will soon be fully on par with human translation, with a TTE of 1.

There’s so many other things you can do.

Spend time with your kids. Get in shape. Put in more hours at work and get that promotion faster. Learn some data science. Watch The Dark Knight Batman movie again (it’s so good). Mentally prepare for superintelligent, autonomous robots to take over every human job within the next generation of science. Well, you get the point. Life is short, and time is getting shorter and shorter.

NOT Reasons to Learn a New Language

It changes the way you think.

This is not a reason, because it doesn’t. Not really. John McWhorter articulates this point so well in his TED talk on why to learn a language, so I’ll skip the cut and paste. See it here (start at timestamp 1:53).

Yes, there are studies, but as McWhorter points out, they are fringe and obscure at best. He cites a study where French and Spanish speakers tended to conceptualize of an anthropomorphized table in more feminine tones, to a statistically significant degree. Not surprisingly, in the years since McWhorter gave his talk, other researchers tried and failed to replicate the results of the unpublished study that he referenced (Phillips & Boroditsky 2003, which by the way actually used Spanish and German). But even if the results had been validated, it hardly qualifies as “changing the way you think.” Such stretching of the data to make grandiose claims is reminiscent of those experiments where they claim chimps or tamarin monkeys acquired human language. No. They. Didn’t. There may be shadows of this, yes, but nothing robust.

The strong version of what linguists call the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis — that language determines thought — has failed to stand up to experimental scrutiny again and again. Humans are capable of perceiving color differences that their language doesn’t distinguish; speakers of languages with no grammatical verb tense can still perceive time sequences. Learning another language’s grammatical structures will not substantially change how you see the world.

It helps you to communicate with more people.

See the points above.

I suppose the last reason why one might consider learning a new language is to be able to communicate with more people. I was going to exclude this reason but that would just be overstating my point a bit too much. Of course it’s helpful for communication and seems like it should be the first reason. However for the reasons for not learning a language given at the beginning of this post, it’s not at all obvious you really need to learn a language if conveying information is your top priority. Because you can just speak English. Or better yet, use computers.

Reasons To Learn A New Language

All these are very compelling reasons not to learn a language and no one will blame you if you are convinced by any of them. And a number of reasons you may have thought were good for learning a language aren’t actually very good reasons. But let me present some reasons to learn a new language that might not have been obvious before.

There are quite a few articles and talks out there on why you should learn a language. One of the best is McWhorter’s TED Talk that I’ve alluded to. He mentions some of the points below in much more eloquent terms. And then there’s the old cat and mouse joke.

Stay healthy.

Language-learning is mental exercise, helping the brain maintain its plasticity. Learning another language literally increases your brain volume, just like going to the gym increases muscle volume. One 2012 study showed that interpreters who went through three months of intensive language training showed increased cortical thickness and hippocampus volume compared to those in the control group. Learning another language keeps your brain nimble: Bilinguals have been shown to be better multitaskers, and from an early age, as young as six!

An increasing literature connects bilingualism to protection against dementia. A 2014 study that controlled for a number of confounding factors and followed a cohort of 853 participants from 1947 to 2010 found a “protective effect of bilingualism against age-related cognitive decline” that could not be explained away by class, gender, immigration status, or even general childhood intelligence. Good news: Most of these participants learned their second languages after childhood; and learning three or more languages had better effects than learning two!

It’s fun.

I’ve always thought it was fun, since it’s like solving puzzles. John McWhorter’s talk again gives some great examples of language-learning fun, but there are so many. Imagine learning Finnish, where instead of our three English cases (i.e., “he” = subjective case, “him” = objective case, “his” = possessive case) or Russian’s six, you find there are fifteen cases. (Get this: They have three different “internal locative” cases alone, one each for “in it,” “out from inside it,” and “into it.”) Or navigate your way through Kiswahili, where instead of the two genders of French or German’s three, you have eighteen noun classes, including one for “plants” and another for “things with an extended outline shape.” For a fun mouth workout, try learning a West African language with labial-velar consonants like Nigeria’s Igbo. Technically, the two letters ‘gb’ in the middle of the word “Igbo” itself are supposed to be pronounced together, with your tongue and lips opening at the same time, as ‘ɡ͡b’ instead of ‘g’ followed by ‘b’. Try it: It’s fun!

Besides, as McWhorter says, learning languages is easier than ever now. As of this writing, Rosetta Stone now offers 25 languages, DuoLingo 43 languages (now including Haitian Creole and Zulu), and even if you happen to want to learn a niche language like Wolof (Senegal’s national language), you can find apps for that too. You say you just want practice? Great! Scroll your tweets in Catalan (#Llengua) or join a Burmese Facebook group (just search “မြန်မာစာ”). In 2023 we have near-universal language access in our pocket.

Opens hearts.

Learning a language opens hearts, starting with your own.

1. Intrinsic perspective: The language itself may not change the way you think in the deterministic sense described above, but the culture and people who speak the language may leave their impact on your thinking. Speaking their language will open the door for you to engage in that kind of mind-expanding exchange. As McWhorter says, “If you want to imbibe a culture […] you have to control the language the culture is conducted in. There’s no other way.”
2. Extrinsic perspective:

Rosetta Stone ad

Is speaking someone’s language the ultimate pickup line? Well, I guess. Our hardworking farm boy sure thought so. But the impact of speaking their language goes far beyond conversation starters. Speaking someone’s language shows you respect their tradition and their way of life. It’s a great way to build a foundation for trust and friendship.

Make more money.

Some jobs, especially government jobs serving a multilingual public, pay you more when you can demonstrate knowledge in more languages. Although one study suggests only a modest 2% pay bump for bilingual workers over the course of their career, there are simply more job openings available to bilingual applicants in many industries. A New American Economy study in 2017 found job openings for bilingual applicants had doubled between 2010 and 2015, and large employers like Bank of America and Humana reserved from 25% to 40% of their positions for bilingual employees.

Build humility… and confidence.

There are many other ways to develop these virtues to the extent that you accept them as such. Like watching this three-year-old solve a Rubik’s cube (humility). Or watching a world leader explain how America can be defined in a single word (confidence).

But consider: When you learn a new language and try to use it, you are entering someone else’s world, as an absolutely powerless baby. You are at their mercy and guidance. Now you know how immigrants / foreigners feel.

And when you can speak their language, it’s an amazing feeling. It’s as if you’ve got a new family, except it could be millions of people, depending on the language you learn. Congratulations, now you can do things. Like order food, or ask some guy out on a date, or recommend that the restaurant you’re at should address the bad Google reviews.

Makes learning new languages easier.

This is a little circular, but the more languages you’ve studied or “know,” the easier it gets to learn new ones. You see cognate words across languages, and find deep structures in common. In other words, you make connections that you carry from one language to the next. And with each experience, you build study habits and mental discipline for your next linguistic adventure.

More on this in the next post in the series….

Next up: 9 Ways to Help You Learn a New Language More Effectively