Putting a thing like language learning in terms of ROI is pretty moronic. Ok, that's a simplified vision to understand if time spent learning a foreign language

Putting a thing like language learning in terms of ROI is pretty moronic. Ok, that's a simplified vision to understand if time spent learning a foreign language is actually well spent. What isn't really taken into consideration, though, are the indirect cultural advantages of learning a language. That's an experience that goes beyond the act of learning grammar rules and a new vocabulary. It's a complex process made of many different intellectual and cultural enhancements that help you get the world in a better perspective, and in the end gives you an unquantifiable advantage over the mono-lingual. Apart from that, I agree that Spanish may not be the better choice in the US, since the position of superiority the non-Latin still has when it come to fluency for professional purposes. Even for the Romans it made no sense to learn the language of the inferior populations they had around them, and you'll know how it went down. Learning Saxon languages certainly had a bad ROI back then. Furthermore, if you really had to follow this skewed line of ROI-based reasoning, where the hell is Chinese? I have the hunch that, as an US-born American, knowing the pretty obscure language of one of the biggest traders in the world might give you a pretty big advantage.