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Interesting list. I can certainly agree that Russian is a difficult language to acquire for native english speakers; far harder than Spanish. I am curious, ho

by earl 17y ago

Interesting list. I can certainly agree that Russian is a difficult language to acquire for native english speakers; far harder than Spanish. I am curious, however: has anyone found nonobvious ways to make money with language skills (obvious meaning translator, etc)? While some of these, esp eg Arabic or Russian, might be very interesting to learn, and it would probably be a great experience living in an Arabic speaking country, there are high costs -- the education and the time living in a country and not getting much done but language courses. What are good ways of making this a financially sound thing to do, or will it always be solely a cultural experience?

lele 17y ago
Some time ago, I read an article by an English teacher living in Russia. She said you can make a good living there by privately teaching English.
nearestneighbor 17y ago
I've met some multiligual people. One spoke about a dozen languages (fluently, but far from perfectly, AFAICT), and I think he had a college degree in the humanities even. Worked as a car mechanic, so I guess the answer might be no.
tokenadult 17y ago
In general, the return on investment for a native speaker of English learning any language as a second language is lower than the return for the same person learning a lot of mathematics. People who don't know English usually find better gains by learning English, but they still have to learn some other career skill as well. The least expensive and most effective way to learn a language is to learn a bit of it before foreign residence (so that you'll live in fear of not knowing the language, and study hard) following that by foreign residence and continued part-time focused language study while working and participating in the culture in the new country. And that's just how a lot of second-language speakers of English reach very high levels of proficiency in English.

by earl 17y ago

lele 17y ago

Some time ago, I read an article by an English teacher living in Russia. She said you can make a good living there by privately teaching English.

nearestneighbor 17y ago

I've met some multiligual people. One spoke about a dozen languages (fluently, but far from perfectly, AFAICT), and I think he had a college degree in the humanities even. Worked as a car mechanic, so I guess the answer might be no.

tokenadult 17y ago

In general, the return on investment for a native speaker of English learning any language as a second language is lower than the return for the same person learning a lot of mathematics. People who don't know English usually find better gains by learning English, but they still have to learn some other career skill as well. The least expensive and most effective way to learn a language is to learn a bit of it before foreign residence (so that you'll live in fear of not knowing the language, and study hard) following that by foreign residence and continued part-time focused language study while working and participating in the culture in the new country. And that's just how a lot of second-language speakers of English reach very high levels of proficiency in English.