Fine, I’ll be the one to say it: learning languages sucks.
Sure, every now and then you might learn something about a culture by, I dunno, the word for “woman” being the same as the word for “peace”.
But for the most part, it’s trying to memorize fairly arbitrary grammatical rules and combinations of syllables to relearn vocab you already know in your own language.
And think how much better we’d understand each other’s cultures without language barriers.
Bring on the tech I say. I hear that the arabic translator (machines) that the military use are already pretty effective, factor in the ubiquitousness of high computing power on everyone’s phone and I think a translator capable of basic conversation with few errors is right around the corner.
On the other hand, learning another language’s “fairly arbitrary grammatical rules” and the way it does things can really help you understand how your own language works, and why it does things the way it does. You begin to see that there’s more than one way a language can work, and, since we use language to think with and to communicate with, that means that at least to a small degree there are differences in the ways people think and communicate.
Don’t care.
But if I did, the simplest way to improve my knowledge of English would be by using resources specifically concerned with English. Learning a foreign language would be a very indirect, inefficient method.
There are of course different ways that people think and communicate within a language. So what is the tangible benefit of language barriers?
And for the most part you don’t really get that nuance from being fluent in the language so much as you do from being able to commnicate and understand people from taht culture. For example, simply being fluent in Chinese via Rosetta Stone is not going to give you some incredible insight into their culture but it will allow you to more fully experience their culture when you go to China.
For example one of my associates has speaks perfect English with a midwestern accent but he doesn’t really get our sense of humor or many of the cultural references. I figure a babble fish will do more for allowing people to understand each other’s cultures (by breaking down communication barriers) than learning their language will.
Sure you would increase the learning curve for learning a language at the front end, but at some point its a bit like using a GPS to go everywhere. You simply won’t learn the local roads and streets as well as you would if you had to figure it all out without the GPS.
You would need about as many people fluent in a particular language as you have people fluent in Aramaic.
It is these arbitrary grammatical rules that makes universal transaltors so difficult to program.
Most of these rules are learned by rote. Do you know why we use me instead of I in certain sentences? Does it provide any insight into our culture?
Sure you might learn a bit more about teh Eskimo perspective when you find out that they have dozens of different words for ice but those sort of revelations from language are fairly uncommon compared to the PITA rules that are the result of arbitrary grammatical rules.
Having studied French for years, I disagree to an extent. I don’t think you can ever really start to see your own language “from the outside in” until you get to the outside. (Think of trying to figure out what you look like to others without mirrors or other reflective surfaces.)
OTOH I’m not sure how fluent you need to get in a foreign language before this “clicks”; and having also dabbled in Russian and Spanish I think it becomes diminishing returns with additional languages beyond the second (although Russian, for instance, made me see how articles and the present tense of “to be” are superfluous even though we are so used to them and feel like they are necessary).
I hope that it also showed you the importance of having two sets of verbs of motion.
Even if machine translation is 99.9% effective, any translation is in the end a betrayal of the original text. In any case, even if machine translation were magically effective, learning a new language would still be an important human task. I don’t think that distance running became pointless after the invention of the automobile.
I’m not sure what you mean about “verbs of motion”.
I do strongly agree with you about a translation being “a betrayal of the original text” (although I think we can make some exception for those authors who do their own translating). When it comes to literature, I firmly believe translations are pretty close to worthless; thus I always have to repress an urge to openly scoff when I hear for instance that someone is a great fan of the novels of Tolstoy or the short stories of Chekhov, despite their not knowing Russian. I myself make a point of reading only literature written in English or French.
OTOH translation is highly useful for more functional texts and for interpersonal communication. And that’s where the economic argument comes into play. Someone who is college educated and fluent in Spanish may have a real leg up in seeking employment in 2025, but if that is going to disappear by 2030, I’d think it might not be worth the time and effort to develop true fluency (as opposed to getting more of a little taste of the language in a semester or two).
Sure, the development of the car didn’t eliminate long distance running from the face of the earth; but for the vast majority it reduced it to a hobby. Very few people make their living from running–whereas in the past there were eras when runners had an important economic role as messengers or hunters.
Actually, I’d guess it would have the opposite effect. Language and culture are inextricably linked. I know you dismissed that earlier, but in my experience there are plenty of words and phrasings that contain cultural baggage and social conventions. Those are usually stripped away when translating leading to an at least partially false sense of what was originally said.
In any case, I don’t think automatic translation is ever going to take the place of language learning for non-trivial tasks. So much of translation is contextual that it would take a fundamental leap in AI to get there, especially for languages distant from English.
Closer to “many decades,” I think. If you’ve seen the Jeopardy episodes with the Watson computer, you know we’re still a ways off from developing software that can understand the nuances of human speech as we speak. Even if that’s not the case, it does not mean that learning other languages is pointless. And compared to developing the software, it doesn’t cost that much to have a middle schooler practice a foreign language for a couple of years (even though it’s more effective if they start earlier).