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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Freakonomics did an interesting podcast on this:

http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/06/is-learning-a-foreign-lan...

Their conclusion was that bilingualism doesn't increase your earnings potential commensurate with all of the study required to become bilingual. (They focused on economic and not cultural value.)

The exception was English. If you don't speak English, you will make much more if you learn English.

They also discussed how supply-side is important in the market for bilinguals. In the US, learning Spanish will not increase your income by much, but learning German might.

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The obvious question would be whether this works differently for languages learned as a child vs as an adult.

For me the "cost" of learning English as a second language in school was negligible (even if you factor in all the hours actually spent in class) because a lot of the learning was actually passive or even recreational (e.g. watching movies, playing games).

OTOH, learning a second (or third) language later on would have required much more investment. I actually tried several languages in university and eventually decided that I just didn't have the time or interest to learn any of them properly (i.e. the cost would have been too high and the immediate return extremely low with long-term return also being questionable).

To figure the "cost" of learning a language in school you need to count what else you could have been learning with that time.

Sure, but realistically that's not as "expensive" as it would seem. It's not like you could replace it with just about anything (it'd have to be a class that could realistically be taught instead, requiring a realistic syllabus, a sufficient availability of capable teachers and sufficient demand). And if you want to be properly realistic, you'd have to limit the alternatives to what would have been available alternatives in school if it was an elective. And if considering alternatives outside school, you also have to factor in the overhead (whereas in school you're already paying that anyway).

Besides, it's naive to treat cost as simply a measure of time. In some cases time spent in school is much more intense than outside of it. In other cases it's the opposite.

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