Spanish Is a Waste of Time

Even though I’m majoring in math and computer science, I’m required to take a few semesters of foreign language before I graduate. I picked Spanish because it’s the easiest. Now, after about a hundred hours of listening to people speak gibberish, I’m ready to give my professional opinion of the subject: no me gusta. Spanish is a sad, boring waste of my time.

The Best Language

To be clear, I don’t think all languages are a waste of time. In fact, there’s one that I’m honored to study. The language I’m talking about transcends cultural differences and geography. It plays a pivotal role in science and business worldwide. It’s perhaps the most fundamental and powerful method humans have to communicate.

You might think that I’m talking about math, and it’s true that I would rather learn the language of the universe than the language of Mexico. But no, the language I’m talking about—the language of revolutionary academic papers, bestselling novels, and all the world’s wealthiest companies—is English.

The value of English can’t be overstated. If you don’t speak English and you want to achieve something great, you should devote all your resources to learning it. But I got lucky and was born into it. For a native English speaker like me, spending time on a second language offers little additional benefit, and it even feels like squandering some of my good luck.

I’m not saying that English is better designed than other languages, only that it’s spoken by more people and in more important places. For example, if I wanted to work at Google’s headquarters to build the inventions of the future, English would help me, and Spanish would not. If I wanted to write an article to sway the opinions of the most powerful people in the world, English would give me more reach than Spanish.

People rarely say that English is the best language—they think it sounds insensitive—but the numbers show that they agree. In 2019, English is the most widely spoken language in the world, with about 1.13 billion speakers. However, when you only count native speakers, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish both beat English by a huge margin. This means that the dominance of English is a result of people choosing to learn it. They recognize its high value in comparison to other languages.

English is the best language for anyone to learn, but the calculation is even simpler if you’re planning to spend your entire life in the United States. As an American going into technology, I will probably never need to speak Spanish with anyone in my life. For me, English is the only language with any value. (And even if I do decide to move to a Spanish-speaking country, I would prefer to study the language then, when I know it will be useful to me, rather than preparing now for a 1-in-a-1000 outcome.)

All that said, if we set the practical usefulness of English and Spanish aside and compare them based only on which is better designed, I will admit that the edge goes to Spanish. The beauty of Spanish, as my classes have taught me, is that you can almost always tell how a word is pronounced by reading it and how it is spelled by hearing it. Spanish speakers don’t have debates like car-mul vs. care-a-mel and see-rup vs. sur-up. And the Spanish pronunciation of “quinoa” is much less arguable than the English pronunciation. (The English pronunciation is kwin-oh-uh, and I will say so to any vegan.)

On the other hand, English is miles better designed than Mandarin—an absolute train wreck of a language which has literally set back the Chinese economy. Each Mandarin word is written as a different character, and the characters aren’t built up from an alphabet of letters with set pronunciations. This means that pronouncing an unfamiliar written word is largely guesswork, even for a fluent speaker. It also makes typing difficult; how do you fit the thousands of characters onto a keyboard? Written Mandarin was so unworkable that in the 1950s, the Chinese government developed an alphabet for the language called Pinyin, which resembles English and tries to solve the typing and pronunciation problems.

I guess that I have learned something by being forced to think about languages. But let’s just say that after my first semester of Intermediate Google Translate, when they asked me to share some weak points of the course, a few came to mind.

Quote from my (hopefully anonymous) review:

English is the language of science and the language of commerce. Spanish (like German, French, Chinese, etc.) is a party trick that American travelers use to impress their friends while abroad.

It’s a tragedy that English-speaking engineers and scientists are required to waste time learning a second-rate language that they will rarely use. And that’s assuming a language can actually be learned over a few semesters of college—which of course it can’t. Classes like this set society back by using up time that aspiring professionals could otherwise use to master their craft.

Can I Learn Spanish?

My review brings us to an important point. Before we can discuss whether we should teach Spanish, we first need to ask whether we even can. The answer, obviously, is no. No one has ever learned Spanish by sitting through it in college.

I recently mentioned to my roommate that I’m taking Spanish. It turns out he’s a native speaker, so he hit me with a question at 300 miles per minute. He might as well have told me to go fuck myself (and maybe he did). When I finally stopped blinking and admitted I knew nothing about Spanish, he snorted smugly. He probably gets a kick out of doing that to every innocent STEM major who is pressed into studying the language of his ancestors.

To be fair, even though I can’t understand spoken Spanish, I can occasionally make some sense of the written language. But I doubt I’ll be able to in three years. Even the Spanish department at my university seems to agree that their lessons have an expiration date. Their syllabuses strongly discourage us from taking a semester off in between classes, in case the tiny bit of knowledge we accumulate vanishes over six months without practice.

It’s not my fault that my Spanish abilities are so weak and fleeting. I do most of the homework and get top scores on the tests. And I think I have a better-than-average talent for picking up languages. For example, when I read a piece of writing, I almost always absorb the author’s style, whether I want to or not.

I once read a story called Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. It was twenty-nine pages of this:

I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy returned. Was there any other thing in which I could procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?—my hired clerk? What added thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?

Ick.

But when I finished the story, I realized that my inner thoughts were entirely in that voice. I was unable to think a modern-sounding sentence. I was so impressed at how accurately I was matching the tone of the story that I thought, Wow, it’s amazing how good I am at picking up writing styles. But I was still under the influence of Herman Melville, so I didn’t think it exactly like that. Instead, I thought, Every man must permit himself one immodesty.

I actually permit myself several immodesties, if I’m being totally honest, but the point of that anecdote is that language comes naturally to me. So if my Spanish knowledge is nonexistent after a year of classes, I find it hard to imagine that any of my classmates are approaching proficiency.

No doubt you can become good at a language by spending time in a place where it’s spoken. I’ve seen the massive difference that sort of immersion makes for students who have studied abroad. But if you just want to show up to Spanish class and do the assignments, like you would for any other class, I don’t think it’s possible to learn the language. Spanish class on its own does not teach Spanish.

Opening Our Minds with Baseball

One argument people make for mandatory Spanish classes is that knowing the language, even just a bit of it, opens the doors to rewarding experiences you couldn’t have otherwise had. They say you won’t necessarily need Spanish to achieve your goals (the way English is a strict prerequisite for communicating in important venues), but you can still find a lot of personal fulfillment and new ideas by reading Spanish literature or interacting with Spanish speakers in their native language.

This is the argument people make for every required gen-ed class. It boils down to, “I like this subject, so you should have to study it.”

I’m at college to learn math and programming skills that will help me in my chosen pursuits. Occasionally, I may take a class with no obvious use to me just because I’m interested in the topic. But I shouldn’t have to study a subject that is neither practical nor interesting to me just because it’s interesting to someone else.

For example, I could say that an understanding of baseball opens the doors to rewarding experiences you couldn’t have otherwise had, so art majors should have to take a few courses on baseball and its history.

It’s true that baseball has been a big source of fulfillment for many people. Maybe I could say that the friendships I’ve made in my local rec league have been some of the best of my life, and as a naturally non-sporty person, being able to discuss the game with strangers has exposed me to a major part of our culture that would otherwise have been hidden. Baseball broadens your horizons and is just plain fun.

And if one of our art majors objects that baseball isn’t for her, well how would she know? She hasn’t tried studying it yet. She should at least get some exposure, so that path is open to her if she changes her mind.

This is fundamentally the same as the argument that STEM majors should have to take foreign language: “I like baseball, so you should have to study it.” Who knows, if universities were run by former MLB pitchers instead of disgruntled hippies, I might really be complaining about my baseball classes.

Making someone study something they don’t need just because you find it rewarding is hugely arrogant, but it’s also ineffective. If students aren’t interested in a subject, they probably won’t experience its benefits no matter how much time you make them spend. They’ll get through the classes as painlessly as possible, seeking out the easiest professors and doing the bare minimum on assignments, and then they’ll graduate and forget everything they learned. That art major won’t join a rec league or banter about last night’s game with her Uber driver. Most STEM majors won’t move to a Spanish-speaking country, and we won’t try to read Spanish novels. Even if my university moves Heaven and Earth to successfully teach me Spanish, despite my disinterest and the sheer difficulty of learning a language, I won’t use it to explore a new culture, so I won’t get any of the supposedly mind-expanding benefits.

Then again, some people say that learning a place’s language is, on its own, enough to give you insight into the culture—as though pronunciation and sentence structure are windows into the soul. Well, if it’s true that someone’s pronunciation can be used to judge his inner character, then I have bad news for the people who call quinoa keen-wa. Dress light for the afterlife.

Like a Rocket Ship for Your IQ

If foreign languages are relatively useless compared to English, and if they can’t be effectively taught, then it’s hard to see why people in unrelated fields should be required to study them. But some proponents of mandatory foreign language classes don’t care about practical use. They claim that the mere act of studying a foreign language makes you smarter—whether or not you reach proficiency or end up using the language—and that’s reason enough to require it. Apparently, they would consider Elvish from Lord of the Rings a valid language choice.

To be fair, a class that meaningfully boosts your intelligence would be a vital help to anyone pursuing a STEM career, so it would make sense for it to be a required part of a STEM degree. I just don’t think that learning a foreign language makes you significantly smarter. In fact, as far as I can tell, it could even be harmful.

If I could snap my fingers and immediately be fluent in Spanish, I don’t even know that I would. What if I start primarily associating pencils with the word lápiz, so it takes me an extra millisecond to recall their English name? What if I find myself wanting to use a Spanish expression with no English equivalent, so I stumble in a conversation? Since English is the only language I use to communicate, anything that slows down my English by even a sliver effectively reduces my verbal intelligence.

On the other hand, there may be some small benefit to knowing multiple expressions for the same idea. Maybe now I think of this thing as a pencil, but if I also knew it as a lápiz and a bleistift, then I would stop associating it strongly with any word, and I would just think of it as a long, yellow thing that writes. Maybe the underlying concept would be a little clearer if it wasn’t so tightly attached to English. (There’s a similar idea in machine learning. Often, a single machine learning model has a lot of random quirks, but when you take the average of a bunch of models, their quirks cancel out and you get a more accurate picture of reality.)

But advantages like that, even if they’re real, aren’t substantial enough to justify requiring foreign language classes. We could describe comparable supposed advantages for pretty much any non-required activity. Meditating focuses your thoughts. Chatting with people boosts your emotional intelligence and teaches you to see things from different perspectives. Even playing videogames improves your spatial awareness and communication.

My point is that most mental tasks can be argued to make you smarter in some way, and the arguments for studying foreign language don’t seem exceptionally strong. If my Spanish class were made optional, whatever the students choose to do in its place would probably be of similar benefit, and they would give it more effort because they actually want to do it.

For example, I know exactly what I would do if I didn’t have to go to Spanish class. I would attend a math club that meets at the same time.

Actually, the club starts a little earlier, so I can usually stop by for a few minutes before Spanish, and I can see what topics I’ll be missing out on while I’m conjugating verbs in my $150 workbook. After a few of those brief visits to the math club, I realized something funny. I could now make a list of useful things I don’t know because of Spanish, and it would be longer than the list of useful things I do know because of Spanish.

Maybe one day I’ll really make those lists, set them side-by-side, and contemplate the value of a college education.