Have you ever thought about the money you’re spending to learn a language? Assuming you’re not only using free material, you might be spending money on books, access to a language learning website, classes etc. Do you keep track of those costs?

 

If you’re learning a language as a hobby, do you have a limit of what you want to spend on your hobby? Is it a “fixed” limit (as in: “I’m only going to spend x $ per month) or do you not think about the cost as long as you still have enough money to live?

 

If you’re learning a language to advance your career, have you thought or even calculated how much higher your salary will probably be if you speak that language and compared that with the amount of money you’ve spent so far on studying it?

 

Or have you ever thought more generally about whether the salary you’re getting (or hope to get) is worth the money you spent on your professional education?

 

Personally, I keep track of all of my expenses and each expense gets assigned a category. At the moment, I use “education” for both my Japanese classes as well as my French magazine subscription.

 

Years ago, I spent four months in Italy and took classes to learn Italian. It cost a lot of money, and now I often think to myself that I shouldn’t spend so much on languages if I’m not gaining anything. Then again, some people spend a lot of money on other hobbies (horseback riding, gliding, come to my mind) without expecting a return.

Some people even argue that machine translation will make language learning obsolete soon (or perhaps not so soon), or that it's not worth learning any language other than English, because "everyone speaks English" and you can just use that to communicate with people around the world.

What do you think?