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[quote=Anonymous]NP. Can all the foreign language snobs stop making this specious analogy that calculators are to math as translation apps are to FL?

Look, folks, no one acquires math skills simply by growing up in math-land or something. Everyone - everywhere - has to exercise critical thinking and actually develop skills to do math and especially high-level math. The playing field is level. Math skills demonstrate real intelligence.

By contrast (excepting dead languages like Latin), putting in thousands of hours to learn a FL is not really something that reliably gives you a competitive advantage because MILLIONS OF PEOPLE speak that language by virtue of their family or country. It’s a VERY DUBIOUS investment of time in the modern era. No one needs your mediocre foreign language skills when plenty of bilingual and multilingual folks came by their skills naturally.

When I look around at my (very successful) peers, literally no one has foreign language skills to thank for anything.

I say this all as someone who learned not one but two difficult FLs (deemed critical for US national security), worked as a linguist for years in one of those language, and now not infrequently uses the other language in a different job. But I’m not so self-centered that I think my own enjoyment of languages means it’s actually a good idea to force high schoolers and college students to waste time on them. It’s NOT a good idea. I have totally deprioritized FLs for my kids.

I also call BS on everyone equating FL with knowledge or respect for other cultures. Absolutely not true. Plenty of monolingual Americans are interested in foreign countries and learn plenty about them in English. Plenty of English-only friends know as much or more facts than me about the countries where the FLs I know are spoken. I’m not morally superior to them because I know the languages. [/quote]

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