I don't know anyone who has derived much benefit from knowing a second language.

One time, way back, I knew a guy who was picked first to go to our office in Germany because he knew some German. But we all went later anyway, so not much of an upside there.

I know a lot of people who know Chinese, Spanish, Hindi (multicultural workforce), they all just do the same damn job I do.

Unless you're going for an actual translator position, I'm skeptical.

You need to combine it with an underlying skill.
It goes a long way towards being irreplaceable.

but that's limited to fields where you have significant interaction with different markets.

The more difficult your field the easier it is to compete with foreign language expertise. b/c narrower field.

But most companies overseas is not their market.

my friend sells upscale watches knows french english spanish and creole, hes the area manager for the southern US and Caribbean. base 80k, plus 10% commission on 20k+ watches.

they'd almost certainly have to replace him with minimum 2 people of equivalent sales skill.

My bro is multilingual and I swear it has given him an amazing way of thinking. The way he structures arguments is fantastic, as if he's thinking things through in three different grammar styles at once, allowing him to arrive at a solid point really quick

He might have always been that smart but I really think learning any skill really gets you thinking in new ways - learning a language is just measurable in terms of success level

>>1344624
Language undergrad here.

Here's the problem:

Learning Mandarin or whatever is great, but you've got to remember that there are over a billion Chinese people who will work for far far cheaper than you, and probably speak English as well as you speak Mandarin, so they're the logical hire. In addition, if you work there, you'll get a local (read: shit) salary if you're hired there, so your only option is to get hired at home, THEN sent abroad (this does happen).

Failing that, if you wanted to do something language-specific, you're looking at translation or interpretation (fuck all money tbqhwu), or you could extend your studies and do Linguistics. If you had a Linguistics PhD, you COULD try and work in NLP or something.

A more common route would be to do sales, which is a legit good use for languages. I didn't like it all that much, and found I was actually more suited to the backend side of things, so I'm a business analyst now (unfortunately, my languages have gone to shit)


I fucking love languages, and it's something I'm good at, but fuck me it's hard to get something relevant unless you do sales.