einzelne wrote:golyplot wrote:That depends on whether you speak English or not.
Yes, English is one of the obvious exceptions. But the OP is written by a native English speaker. And when Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Korean are mentioned as languages who have more 'economic power' I cannot help but laugh and ask: Do you understand how much time, energy and, hell, money you need to invest in order to rip some economic benefits from these languages (which are not even guaranteed)? After all, that's why YouTube polyglots live in palaces and make clickbait videos just for fun:)
Even with English, in my own native country I saw hundreds of people who were wasting their money on English courses, just to put it in their CV, while in reality they never used it (and they already had passable passive skills to read relevant documents for example).
Right. There have been some econometric studies estimating the wage premium of a second language in the USA and it usually comes out very low, maybe 2-3% (and not necessarily causal). That's a paltry benefit compared to the investment required to learn a language to a high enough level for it to be of any professional use.