Foreign language proficiency as the ultimate personal asset
In the wake of AI, it’s all too easy to assume that no one needs to learn languages anymore. Machine translation is better than ever: ChatGPT can spit you out a sleek (and grammatical!) email in any European language, Microsoft Teams will interpret your online meetings, Google Translate will render anything in any language perfectly intelligible—just point at it with your camera. And the whole world speaks English anyway, so why bother? I dare to disagree. Learning another language is one of the best personal investments one can make (*). Your motivation behind learning a foreign language might, and probably will, change over time. But proficiency in another language is the ultimate personal asset. The thing is, you never really know how a given language will serve you in the future, but it is very, very likely that the return on this investment will be higher than you could ever imagine (**).
(*) Arguably, it is still a function of your target language and how it fits into your life. Learning Uzbek offers a lower ROI than learning Spanish—unless you’re planning to spend the next five years in Uzbekistan, in which case Uzbek becomes indispensable while Spanish turns useless.
(**) That is, once you achieve the level where you are actually functional in this language—not necessarily fluent and flawless, but simply functional. I define “functional” as being able to read a book, understand others and hold a conversation with relative ease for half an hour or so.
Here’s a case in point: knowing French ultimately got me permanent residence in Canada. In May 2021, IRCC opened two temporary immigration streams for recent university graduates: one English-speaking, with a cap of 40k applications, and one French-speaking, with no cap. The former filled up within 24 hours. The latter was open until they shut down the TR-to-PR program, six months later. Total number of applications in the French-speaking stream? 4,697. (Mine was one of them.) Now, even if you didn’t know any French, technically, you still had six months to learn it. It’s not rocket science. It would take you 3-4 months to get your French to the required B1 level or higher and pass the proficiency test—et voilà, a year later you’d be gently stroking your new and shiny PR card.
In comparison, a “normal” immigration track for a recent university graduate—provided that they didn’t make a mistake of rushing headfirst into grad school—would be to get a post-graduation work permit, work for a few years as a permit holder and then apply for PR. Fun fact—at that point in time, someone who’s done it via the TR-to-PR academic/French-speaking stream, is already eligible for Canadian citizenship. In other words, if only you knew French—or knew how to learn French in the time that you’ve got (6 months),—you’d be able to fast-track your immigration and get a Tier A passport years ahead of the normal timeline.
Opportunities like this are rarely on your radar when you’re just starting out. I promptly got my French to B2 during the summer break after my freshman year in college only because the financial pain of losing another $12k on obligatory French courses over the next two years was too much to bear. Just five years down the road, proficiency in this language got me a bilingual degree, a multilingual consultant job, a second residence and two good friendships.
And who knows what else is down the road? I could move to Quebec, or go work in France, or stay in Morocco for a few months (or travel to any other place on Earth where French is widely spoken)—and my ROI for French would go even higher. The thing is, once you know a given language (or, better yet, know how to learn it in a short timeframe), you can think differently. You can think globally. Because the #1 problem that refrains most people from going to greener pastures (be it travelling, doing business, working or moving abroad)—not knowing the local language—is no longer a problem. You can just go and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
And should I even say anything about learning English and the return on that investment—for those of us who grew up speaking a different language?
Knowing how to learn a language fast is the ultimate life skill of the 21st century. Every new language you learn becomes a wildcard in your hand. You don’t know how it will play out, but you can be certain that it will benefit you regardless. With affordable global travel and now-normalized remote work, you have access to the whole world. You get to choose your playground—and on the global scale: you get to decide where to live, what kind of education to get (and for how much!), where to work, invest and pay taxes, and who to date and be friends with.
It is painful to see how people miss global opportunities in every domain of life because they don’t believe that 3-4 months is a reasonable timeframe for language learning.
Written by Alina Kuimova | 01/08/2024