# Don't learn foreign languages



## Palavra (Sep 7, 2009)

Ή αλλιώς, πες τα, χρυσόστομε!

Everyone seems to think that learning a foreign language is a good idea. *Wrong. * It takes a lot of time, and causes a lot of headaches, literally. Its exhausting, and most importantly, it’s bad for business.

According to the Department of State, it takes about 2500 hours of serious study to learn a language sufficiently well to function diplomatically in that language, if the language is closely related to English, and as much as 4000 hours for a language less similar, say such as Japanese. Now I don’t’ have time to give you a citation for that, since it’s bound to take as much as three minutes on Google, but you can take my word for it. This also poses the questions: just how much of a foreign language does a diplomat need to know to be a good diplomat. I’m thinking, “Well, did you ever say, ‘what a swell party this is?’” That can’t be that difficult to say in many languages. So is it safe to assume that other professions require additional hours of study for language mastery? So let’s say 3000 hours on average. So if you value your time it’s a pretty serious investment. And where’s the payoff? For love… to talk to grandma, (or to pick up girls or boys) it’s time well spent… but for business, *stick to business and let the translators do the translation. *I think I’m going to have to work on that pitch.

Από εδώ.


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## daeman (Sep 7, 2009)

Έχει πολλά καλά ο ιστότοπος αυτός. Ευχαριστώ, Παλάβρα!
Ξεχώρισα πρόχειρα ένα από αυτά με τίτλο Translating Neanderthal και παραθέτω δύο αποσπάσματά του:

Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice with a computer synthesizer. The size and shape of the Neanderthal larynx was inferred by a series of skull measurements. [...]
The archeological records suggests that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon interacted, or at least existed in the same place at the same time, and that among the Neanderthal there were three distinct sub populations among them.
Did these sub populations talk to each other? Were there linguistic specialists among those populations who managed cross-species communication, _i.e._, cave man interpreters? The way language has emerged among Homo Sapiens suggests that interpreters emerged quite early in human prehistory. While there is strong evidence for cultural interaction between Neanderthal and humans, evidence for cross breeding is much more controversial. *Does this mean that translation is not the second-oldest profession?*


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