Against Learning Languages

In school, that is

1.

In the state of Michigan, high schoolers have to spend at least two years learning a foreign language.

At my school, and at every other school that follows the IB curriculum, the minimum requirement is four years.

Every year of high school! I’m made to spend 180 hours learning a language I will almost certainly never use again for the vast majority of my life.

This might seem pretty tame to you—everyone goes through it, it’s the status quo. But I think it really is a significant injustice.

Let me give you a sense of the scale—there are about 400,000 high school students in Michigan at any given time. If we assume that each is taking on the bare minimum language requirement—two years out of four—then we have 200,000 students spending 180 hours each year.

A total of 36 million hours dedicated to foreign language learning. Say that all these high schoolers could’ve found employment at minimum wage instead—we’re talking about losses to the tune of half a billion dollars.

Not “losses,” say the liberals, but investment!

Language learning requirements have staunch defenders, and the arguments I’ve heard can be broken down into four types. Learning a language…

• …helps your employment prospects and/or makes you a better worker.

• …improves cross-cultural understanding and/or makes you a better citizen.

• …helps you think in new ways and/or makes you a smarter person (broadly based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

• …is fun!

These are all largely unconvincing reasons to spend $500 million.

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2. Employment

This is one I haven’t heard as often since ChatGPT came out, and since Google Translate’s voice feature started getting good.

Truth is, there’s little economic reason to be able to speak any language but English! The only American job where knowing another language gives you a real leg-up is translator. In science and business and medicine and all the other high-class fields that kids at IB schools want to go into, English is the norm.

International research agencies in Switzerland and Germany run their programs in English. Multinational corporations speak English in the boardroom. And hospitals hire dedicated teams of medical translators to keep their doctors’ days uncomplicated.

Globally speaking, once you’ve reached a high status job, you’ll be working with English. This is the biggest caveat to my argument necessary—in other countries, learning a foreign language is significantly more worthwhile, provided that language is English.

But here in the Anglosphere, the only ones who need to know another language are translators. And they’re a dying breed.

Machine translation is getting stupendously good, and it’s beginning to replace professional translators all over.

It’s also coming to jobs where foreign language skills are nice-but-not-necessary. A doctor who can stumble his way through a few lines of broken Spanish is much less effective than one who can whip out her phone and translate her patient’s complaints effortlessly.

Simply put, the market value of foreign language skills is rapidly deteriorating. AI can do it better and cheaper.

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3. Cultural Understanding

Ok, external reward won’t do it. So the language-learning defenders tell us to turn inward.

Fine, they say, the market value of your learning isn’t so high. But isn’t there more to life than that? Don’t you want to really understand cultures different from your own? And don’t you need to know their language to do that?

Let’s accept for a moment that cultural understanding is a virtue in its own right. Why should it be done in a foreign language?

In middle school, we learned about the Day of the dead in Spanish class. Or, at least, we tried to—no one spoke enough Spanish to understand what the holiday was about, so we all just gave up and colored in some skulls.

And the next year, we did the same thing. And again the year after that!

Even for a year or two in high school, we kept learning about the Day of the Dead! And, honestly, I have never understood what it is. I mean, I know the broad strokes—remembering ancestors, building a shrine with an offering, and so on—but I don’t understand why this strange thing exists. It’s not a Christian holiday, is it? Is it Mayan? What the hell’s going on?

See, teaching me about another culture in a language I don’t understand doesn’t create fucking understanding! If anything, it exoticizes and mysticizes traditions different from my own—creating gaps that didn’t exist before.

And why, again, are we doing all this? Why is it so important I know what some Mexicans are doing the day after Halloween?

Can’t we all just kind of mind our own business? If I really want to learn more about another culture, I’ll read the English Wikipedia page. But why on Earth should that kind of learning be mandatory?

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4. New Ways of Thinking

I absolutely love the sci-fi movie Arrival.

[BIG SPOILER ALERT. Scroll to the other bracketed note if you haven’t seen the movie before.]

The plot goes like this: some scary aliens land in a bunch of desolate places on Earth. One of those places is in the US, and General Forest Whitaker recruits linguistics professor Amy Adams to help the military communicate with the aliens.

She eventually figures out how to understand their language. Their written sentences look like this:

See how it’s a circle? As Amy Adams explains, the aliens have to know exactly how the sentence will end before they start writing it. Otherwise, how could they squeeze it into exactly the right amount of space?

So, she figures, the aliens must have some kind of special atemporal perception—they can see the end of the sentence at the same time as the beginning, so maybe they can see the ends of certain other events at the ame time as their beginnings!

As Amy Adams learns the aliens’ language, she begins to see flashes of her own future. And by the time she’s mastered it, she’s become totally temporally unmoored.¹ Seeing all the moments of her life at once.

And it’s beautiful and meaningful and emotional and all very nice.

Better yet, all this is justified with a real linguistic theory: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Unfortunately, according to actual-real-life NIU linguist Betty Birner, the movie “took the hypothesis way beyond anything that is plausible.” Language doesn’t have the ability to manipulate your position in time.

[SPOILERS OVER.]

According to Birner, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is best interpreted as claiming simply that “different language communities experience reality differently.”

This is a much more boring assertion. For example, it explains why Russian speakers can tell apart different shades of blue better than English speakers: they have one word for light blue (goluboy), and one for dark blue (siniy). Native speakers have been primed since childhood to tell these colors apart just like we’ve been primed to tell apart blue and green. That’s pretty cool!

But it doesn’t mean that learning Russian will teach you to tell different blues apart much better. To have been immersed from birth in an entire culture that tells these different blues apart does have a great effect—to simply learn new labels for “light blue” and “dark blue” has none.

This is part of why a lot of linguists and psychologists reject the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or at least accept only an extremely neutered version. The truth is: thought is thought, and language is language. There’s some interplay between these, but you don’t have a ton of control over it. Learning a new language will not teach you to see a new color.

If you want to become a better thinker, focus on becoming a better thinker! Don’t waste years learning a language—waste months reading The Sequences.

And if you’re a state policymaker—don’t mandate classes in language learning! Mandate classes in philosophy or critical thinking or something else that’s actually aimed at improving the mind. Resist the urge to maintain the status quo and simply slap a post-hoc justification on the foreign language classes.

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5. Fun

I’m extremely partial to the argument from fun.

There are lots of good personal reasons to learn a foreign language! To vacation, or connect with family, or enjoy a new slate of media. These are nice and fun things.

So keep them out of my curriculum!

If I really want to watch telenovelas in the original Spanish, I will learn it on my own! And all the other kids who aren’t interested, the ones that are wasting away in our foreign language class, can go off and do something much more useful with themselves.

Remember, just the state of Michigan is “investing” $500 million in foreign language courses. That’s a massive subsidy for giving a few kids the option to learn in school the language they’d want to learn regardless, and forcing the rest to be tortured right alongside them.

Learn a language if you want. But don’t make me do it too.

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Lukethoughts

(One of the highest-length-variance lists we’ve had from Lucas yet!)

• “Sports carry lots of emotion for lots of individuals. The idea of working at a crafts endlessly and to feel that it slipped out of your hand is an incredibly heart wrenching feeling that athletes seem to only share with each other. No way Ari can relate to any of what I just said.” (Ed. note: Great point, athletes are famously the only ones who ever work hard at anything.)

• “Chocolate chip cookies are best when they are practically raw.” (Ed. note: Nope! Cook ‘em through, please.)

• “To anyone reading the blog, Luke has a cello concerto at 7:00 at Lincoln high school and he would love for anyone that knows us to attend!!” (Ed. note: Unknown internet weirdos and pervs are also welcome.)

• “Taoism.” (Ed. note: Word.)

1. Not unlike Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five… which I still haven’t finished. But I will soon! And then review forthcoming!