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> For now... Also for now. Why else would you learn a language? You wouldn't learn it for the past and you wouldn't learn it for the future. English is widely

> For now... Also for now. Why else would you learn a language? You wouldn't learn it for the past and you wouldn't learn it for the future. English is widely spoken right now, and so is useful to know. > I'm trying to avoid being snarky at the false dichotomy. I suppose I could have been more clear. Part of the utility of English is that it's spoken by the Western superpower, the US. By speaking English, that makes your country's economy interact with the US's economy easier. You could learn other superpowers' languages as well like China's and Russia's, but for other Germanic languages, it's much easier to learn English than Russian or Mandarin.

schoen 9y ago
Heh, I thought you were addressing a much more abstract consideration about the global average difficulty of learning languages based on both their relatedness to other languages and their internal complexities are irregularities (see my reply elsewhere in the thread). I didn't realize you were actually thinking more about economic and political considerations. Edit: I feel like many people do learn languages "for the past" or "for the future". For example, many people study ancient languages partly to learn about ancient cultures and ancient history, while many Mandarin learners in the U.S. through the 1990s and 2000s said one motivation was that "China is going to be more important in the future" or something to that effect.
stevekemp 9y ago
> Why else would you learn a language? Because you have a foreign-partner, or because you've moved countries? (Though I appreciate neither of those would be super-common.)