Name: Why learning languages in 2024 is just NOT worth it
Uploaded: 2024-06-26T07:41:16.000Z
Duration: 4 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

know it isn't worth it, you're probably not going to succeed.

The imperative

So I'm this guy who has over a million followers here at YouTube.

And I talk about the joys of language learning and how we can all learn and all this stuff.

But I have to confess that there are moments when I have my doubts.

Is it really worthwhile learning languages?

And I'm reminded of a story told to me by a friend of mine who was traveling.

He was in a, I can't remember whether it was Paris or Tokyo or Istanbul or Buenos Aires, but some city where they spoke a language other than English.

And so he was, uh, at this cafe, he had his, uh, you know, he's going to review his social media or whatever.

And he sits beside this, uh, attractive, uh, you know, girl and he starts staring at her.

And then he kind of says to her in English, she says, you have a lovely smile, which he thought was a really good sort of, uh, pickup line, you know?

And she looks at him in a very unfriendly way and mutters something in the local language.

So undeterred, he sort of whips out his iPhone and he speaks into his iPhone in English and the iPhone then speaks in the local language also saying, you have a lovely smile.

At that point, the girl calls the waiter over and she's pointing in at the, at him and, and, you know, uh, obviously very unhappy and she has moved to another part of the cafe.

So the moral of the story is to me, like, why bother?

You know, he went to the trouble of, you know, using his iPhone to generate his pickup line there in, in the local language and he was still rejected.

So yeah, I question therefore, why bother?

Because learning a language, you know, has to be hard work.

There is an expression, no pain, no gain.

And that's certainly true in language learning.

If you don't subject yourself to drills, to quizzes on things that you have hardly had a chance to get used to in the language, like the subjunctive in French or something, if you don't go to a class and sit there and, uh, maybe you have to read in front of other people and if you read well, then people are jealous and don't like you and if you read badly, they are, they laugh at you or they, it's they listen to you, so it's just not a good situation, but you have to do that.

You got to review, you know, stacks and stacks of flashcards and of course you keep forgetting them and, and it's just a lot of pain.

The whole process is quite painful, you know, and at the end of all this effort, are we going to just be rejected the way my friend was rejected?

I even hear of people who learn a language and go to the country where the language is spoken and they trot out whatever they're able to do in the language.

Like, why should I even bother if you're not going to humor me when I try to use the language that I'm learning?

Uh, now there are people who say the opposite.

There are people who say that in fact, learning can be fun, that the brain will get used to the language.

Eventually with enough exposure, we're going to be able to start using even with some difficulty, as long as we are not afraid that gradually we will improve.

You know, I often mentioned the fact that never has there been so much interesting content available to us in just about any language and never have there been so many people online helping us in the early stages of our learning of any given language.

So the conditions have never been better.

I hear this message and I personally have delivered this message here, uh, to encourage people, but is that realistic?

So today I'm having one of my darker moments and I'm saying, no, it isn't worth it.

A lot of people pay lip service to the idea that they want to learn another language, my advice is don't bother.

In the book that I wrote in 2003 about language learning, I mentioned the parable of the butterfly by Zhuangzi, Chinese Taoist philosopher of 2,500 years ago, where he imagined himself a butterfly and then when he awoke and he realized that he wasn't a butterfly, he was Zhuangzi, then he says, I don't know now whether in fact, I'm a butterfly that now thinks he's Zhuangzi or was I a Zhuangzi who imagined himself a butterfly.

So using the parable of Zhuangzi and having exposed to you some of my dark thoughts about language learning, uh, I'm not sure now whether the Steve that questions the usefulness of language learning is the real Steve or whether I was just pretending to be that.

And in fact, the Steve, the enthusiastic Steve is the real Steve.

 I leave it up to you to figure that out, but do try to bear in mind the fact that it is the 1st of April.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why learning languages in 2024 is just NOT worth it

sort

eventually

process

content