ROI in learning a foreign language is low, unless it is English. But if you must, I would say the next best thing to immersive instruction would be to watch spanish hulu as an aid to learning. You’d get real conversions at conversational speeds.
So after gwern pointed out that there is a transcript and I have read it I made a back of the envelope calculation.
Assumptions: According to Wikipedia people with a bachelor’s degree or higher make $56078 per year, so about $27 per hour. Learning German increases yearly income by 4% and learning it takes about 750 class hours, according to the foreign service institute. Learning Spanish increases income by 1.4% and takes 600 class hours to learn. If we assume that one class hour costs 11.25$ per hour (by glancing at various prices posted on different sites) we can make a calculation.
Assuming the language is learnt instead of working and that the foregone hours have no impact on later earning and that the foregone hours are paid at average salary, the student incurs opportunity cost in addition to the pure class cost. Ignoring all other effects, learning German costs $28657 with return of 2243 p.a. and learning Spanish costs $22926 with return $841 p.a. This works out to 7.8% and 3.6% on initial investment respectively.
So after 13 years learning German pays off, after 28 years learning Spanish pay off. Assuming the language is learnt at young age, at least learning German can be worthwhile. More benign assumptions, such as learning outside of class with some kind of program like Duolingo, will increase the return further, making learning even more worthwhile.
Of course I did not consider learning something else in those hundreds of hours that could have an even greater effect on income but for high income earners language learning is a very plausible way to increase their income. I assume this goes especially for people that have more obvious use of learning an additional language like translaters or investors.
You’re assuming that the correlation is purely causal and none of the increased income correlating with language learning is due to confounds; this is never true and so your ROI is going to be overstated.
This works out to 7.8% and 3.6% on initial investment respectively.
Most people have discount rates >4%, which excludes the latter. Throw in some sort of penalty (50% would not be amiss, given how many correlations crash and burn when treated as causal), and that gets rid of the former.
Language learning for Americans just doesn’t work out unless one has a special reason.
Language learning for Americans just doesn’t work out unless one has a special reason.
Would be nice to know those. The paper states that people in managerial positions get substantially higher relative returns from learning a foreign language. That would be a special reason.
Maybe the returns are much higher for low-income earners. That question is uninteresting for the average LW user but still. I further wonder what the return on learning a language is in the future.
As an aside, I am surprised how hostile US Americans can be when it is suggested to learn another language.
As an aside, I am surprised how hostile US Americans can be when it is suggested to learn another language.
Personally, I find most suggestions and discussion of Americans learning other languages to be highly irritating. They have not considered all of the relevant factors (continent sized country with 310m+ people speaking English, another 500m+ English-speakers worldwide, standard language of all aviation / commerce / diplomacy / science / technology, & many other skills to learn with extremely high returns like programming), don’t seem to care even when it is pointed out that the measured returns are razor-thin and near-zero and the true returns plausibly negative, and it serves as an excuse for classism, anti-Americanism, mood affiliation with cosmopolitanism/liberalism, and all-around snootiness.
It doesn’t take too many encounters with someone who is convinced that learning another language is a good use of time which will make one wealthier, morally superior, and more open-minded to start to lose one’s patience and become more than a little hostile.
It’s a bit like people who justify video-gaming with respect to terrible studies about irrelevant cognitive benefits (FPSes make me faster at reaction-time? how useful! not) - I want to grab them, shake them a little bit, and say ‘look at yourself from the outside! can’t you see that you’re transparently grabbing at flimsy justifications for something which you do for completely different reasons? You didn’t start playing Halo because you read and meta-analyzed a bunch of psych studies and decided that the lifetime reduction in risk from a 3% fall in simple reaction-time was worth 20 hours a week of work. And we both know you didn’t learn French because it’s going to pay off in future salary increases—you learned it because you had to learn something in high school and French has better cultural prejudices associated with it than Spanish!’
True. I come from the other side growing up in Germany and having met with a lot of foreign knowledge workers unwilling to learn even a lick of German. I actually know of several people that are unable to say “No, thank you” or “One beer please” and unwilling to learn. Personally I see this as highly disrespectful of the host country. After stating this opinion the unwillingness is then justified with the international status of English.
Anyhow, we are delving off into politics and thus I’d like to end this debate at this point with your understanding. I hope the downvote is not from you and moreso that is not because of that line only.
Yes, living in a foreign country is a substantially different proposition (and I’d guess that the correlated increases in income would be much higher). But comparing to Germany highlights part of why it’s such a bad idea for Americans: the population of America alone is 3.78x that of Germany, never mind the entire Anglophone world.
Disclaimer: I won’t listen to the podcast, because I am boycotting any medium that is not text.
Language learning may have extremely low ROI in general but extremely high in special cases. E.g. I would not be surprised by finding that people learning the language of the foreign country they live in increases their subjective wellbeing. Or if people want to work as translators. Or they are investors and are specialising in a region not speaking English as their main language.
This almost seems like a fallacy. I might call it “homogenity bias” or “mistaking the average for the whole” just to find out that is already known under a different name and well documented.
Disclaimer: I won’t listen to the podcast, because I am boycotting any medium that is not text.
Good news! Freakonomics is, along with Econtalk and patio11, one of the rare podcasts which (if you had click through) you can see provides transcripts for most/all of all their podcasts.
The earnings of college graduate who speak a foreign language are higher than the earnings of those who don’t. Our estimates of the impact of bilingualism on earnings are relatively small (2%-3%) and compare unfavorably with recent estimates on the returns to one extra year of general schooling (8%-14%), which may help explain current second-language investment decisions of monolingual English-speakers in the United States. the returns may be higher for individuals in management and the business services occupations, and they seem to be higher ex post for individuals who learn a second language later in life. Note that the results in this paper are estimates of the gross returns to learning a second language. Individual decisions on whether to study a second language will depend on (among other things) the opportunity cost of the time devoted to learning it and its nonmonetary rewards.
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t actually considered language learning in an ROI-fashion, but it’s obviously something I should think about before making heavy investments.
I still think it worth the time since my field involves dealing with non-English parties often. Though I have no distinct need for bilingualism at the moment, it will make me more hireable. However, I do need to evaluate my time learning Spanish against, say, the gains of spending that same time learning programming languages.
ROI in learning a foreign language is low, unless it is English. But if you must, I would say the next best thing to immersive instruction would be to watch spanish hulu as an aid to learning. You’d get real conversions at conversational speeds.
So after gwern pointed out that there is a transcript and I have read it I made a back of the envelope calculation.
Assumptions: According to Wikipedia people with a bachelor’s degree or higher make $56078 per year, so about $27 per hour. Learning German increases yearly income by 4% and learning it takes about 750 class hours, according to the foreign service institute. Learning Spanish increases income by 1.4% and takes 600 class hours to learn. If we assume that one class hour costs 11.25$ per hour (by glancing at various prices posted on different sites) we can make a calculation.
Assuming the language is learnt instead of working and that the foregone hours have no impact on later earning and that the foregone hours are paid at average salary, the student incurs opportunity cost in addition to the pure class cost. Ignoring all other effects, learning German costs $28657 with return of 2243 p.a. and learning Spanish costs $22926 with return $841 p.a. This works out to 7.8% and 3.6% on initial investment respectively.
So after 13 years learning German pays off, after 28 years learning Spanish pay off. Assuming the language is learnt at young age, at least learning German can be worthwhile. More benign assumptions, such as learning outside of class with some kind of program like Duolingo, will increase the return further, making learning even more worthwhile.
Of course I did not consider learning something else in those hundreds of hours that could have an even greater effect on income but for high income earners language learning is a very plausible way to increase their income. I assume this goes especially for people that have more obvious use of learning an additional language like translaters or investors.
You’re assuming that the correlation is purely causal and none of the increased income correlating with language learning is due to confounds; this is never true and so your ROI is going to be overstated.
Most people have discount rates >4%, which excludes the latter. Throw in some sort of penalty (50% would not be amiss, given how many correlations crash and burn when treated as causal), and that gets rid of the former.
Language learning for Americans just doesn’t work out unless one has a special reason.
(Unless, of course, it’s a computer language.)
Would be nice to know those. The paper states that people in managerial positions get substantially higher relative returns from learning a foreign language. That would be a special reason.
Maybe the returns are much higher for low-income earners. That question is uninteresting for the average LW user but still. I further wonder what the return on learning a language is in the future.
As an aside, I am surprised how hostile US Americans can be when it is suggested to learn another language.
Personally, I find most suggestions and discussion of Americans learning other languages to be highly irritating. They have not considered all of the relevant factors (continent sized country with 310m+ people speaking English, another 500m+ English-speakers worldwide, standard language of all aviation / commerce / diplomacy / science / technology, & many other skills to learn with extremely high returns like programming), don’t seem to care even when it is pointed out that the measured returns are razor-thin and near-zero and the true returns plausibly negative, and it serves as an excuse for classism, anti-Americanism, mood affiliation with cosmopolitanism/liberalism, and all-around snootiness.
It doesn’t take too many encounters with someone who is convinced that learning another language is a good use of time which will make one wealthier, morally superior, and more open-minded to start to lose one’s patience and become more than a little hostile.
It’s a bit like people who justify video-gaming with respect to terrible studies about irrelevant cognitive benefits (FPSes make me faster at reaction-time? how useful! not) - I want to grab them, shake them a little bit, and say ‘look at yourself from the outside! can’t you see that you’re transparently grabbing at flimsy justifications for something which you do for completely different reasons? You didn’t start playing Halo because you read and meta-analyzed a bunch of psych studies and decided that the lifetime reduction in risk from a 3% fall in simple reaction-time was worth 20 hours a week of work. And we both know you didn’t learn French because it’s going to pay off in future salary increases—you learned it because you had to learn something in high school and French has better cultural prejudices associated with it than Spanish!’
True. I come from the other side growing up in Germany and having met with a lot of foreign knowledge workers unwilling to learn even a lick of German. I actually know of several people that are unable to say “No, thank you” or “One beer please” and unwilling to learn. Personally I see this as highly disrespectful of the host country. After stating this opinion the unwillingness is then justified with the international status of English.
Anyhow, we are delving off into politics and thus I’d like to end this debate at this point with your understanding. I hope the downvote is not from you and moreso that is not because of that line only.
Yes, living in a foreign country is a substantially different proposition (and I’d guess that the correlated increases in income would be much higher). But comparing to Germany highlights part of why it’s such a bad idea for Americans: the population of America alone is 3.78x that of Germany, never mind the entire Anglophone world.
Disclaimer: I won’t listen to the podcast, because I am boycotting any medium that is not text.
Language learning may have extremely low ROI in general but extremely high in special cases. E.g. I would not be surprised by finding that people learning the language of the foreign country they live in increases their subjective wellbeing. Or if people want to work as translators. Or they are investors and are specialising in a region not speaking English as their main language.
This almost seems like a fallacy. I might call it “homogenity bias” or “mistaking the average for the whole” just to find out that is already known under a different name and well documented.
Good news! Freakonomics is, along with Econtalk and patio11, one of the rare podcasts which (if you had click through) you can see provides transcripts for most/all of all their podcasts.
Well fuck me. I saw the streaming bar and closed the tab, so entirely my fault.
Thank you for notifying.
Great link. From the cited paper:
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t actually considered language learning in an ROI-fashion, but it’s obviously something I should think about before making heavy investments.
I still think it worth the time since my field involves dealing with non-English parties often. Though I have no distinct need for bilingualism at the moment, it will make me more hireable. However, I do need to evaluate my time learning Spanish against, say, the gains of spending that same time learning programming languages.