Sounds like somebody's measuring the wrong thing. Sure, we'll grant you that foreign languages don't help your male pattern baldness, nor will they get you out

Sounds like somebody's measuring the wrong thing. Sure, we'll grant you that foreign languages don't help your male pattern baldness, nor will they get you out of trouble with those unpaid parking tickets. But that's not why you learn them. You learn them so that you can sling your hammock on a river boat going up the Amazon from Iquitos and spend a good week getting to know a bunch of locals for whom that's the only transport to or from their village. You learn them so that when you get a flat tire on your rented motorbike in Trang Provence and the local fisherman stops to help, you can share a few words of conversation and he'll invite you back to his stilt house amid the mangroves to meet his family and share a meal of dried fish and seaweed over rice. I've done three laps of this world now, and can safely say that the best experiences I had were the ones interacting with local folks in remote areas that didn't really meet many westerners. Hell, I spent a month in China and by far the two most interesting and enjoyable days were the ones where I had the good fortune to be shown around by friends who were fluent. Speaking English, I could pull off a tourist bus to the Great Wall. Speaking Chinese, I was eating Bao Dze from a little unmarked hole in the wall on a back street in Beijing after watching the sunrise over a part of the city you don't normally get to see. So yeah, I'm not sure how many dollars I got out of any of that. But if anything, I wish I'd spent more time learning foreign languages.