The good thing about learning Spanish
13th July 2008
Steve Sailer‘s take on the whole second-language thing.
For example, even though India is growing in importance, it doesn’t make sense for Americans to learn an Indian language because there are 15 national languages in India, and everybody who is anybody knows English. In China, there are a number of wildly different-sounding dialects, and, besides, be serious, you are never going to get anywhere with studying Chinese. It might make sense to learn Japanese, since so few Japanese learn English, but the Japanese are creeped out by the sight of white people speaking Japanese fluently, so why inflict that upon them? Lots of 19th Century scholars in gloomy Europe fell in love with Arabic, with its beautiful alphabet, but America has its own desert, so we’ve never put much emphasis on Arabic.