Foreign languages are a waste of time

There ROI of learning Russian as an American is close to zero. Only Spanish makes some sense and only because it's not entirely foreign. I know a tiny handful of Westerners who learned to speak Russian, and they wouldn't have lost anything without ever learning a word. Everyone speaks English more or less tolerably anyway. The Japanese are very good at learning Russian for some reason. Takes them about a year to learn to speak pretty well. I studied Japanese for five years very intensively and my Master's thesis was about the concepts of heart and mind in Japanese, but linguistics is mind-numbingly boring, and ultimately it's about as useless a skill as I am as a human being

For some I'm sure they are a waste of time. For others, learning foreign languages is useful.

My oldest was always interested in Russian culture and took four years of Russian language courses in college. I'm sure that served her well during the three years she spent there.

She has also taken several years of Spanish language classes and tells me it is very helpful to know living in Santiago. She says she is still getting used to the Chilean Spanish dialect spoken there. It is apparently a bit different than other Spanish dialects.

I remember rocking corduroy bell bottoms back in the 70's, great pic!

Nice pix and tale.

I wasn't entirely serious

I've yet to meet a foreigner, a non-first-generation expat (or even someone who left Russia/USSR as a child), whose picture of the Russian culture wouldn't be completely detached from reality, unless reality is limited to a bunch of Instagram-grade tourist traps in Mordor Moscow. I know they exist, like that Jolly Farmer guy in the Altai mountains who came here as a child with his ultrareligious parents, but I haven't met any in person. How foreigners who studied Russian culture outside Russia imagine it is usually anywhere between mildly embarrassing to complete sugary stereotype-laced lunacy. Russian culture is NOT a global language despite the wishful thinking of some groups, and is very poorly represented outside the former USSR, so immersion/studying locally is the only way to learn/experience it. Learning English and Spanish as a foreign language is different simply because they have much more cultural weight, globallly. So while I have nothing against such interest, I firmly believe that nowadays, especially with the advance of machine translation/AI, spending precious college time on a rare foreign language, when one's brain is still young and highly functional, or worse, specializing in it, is a risky/unwise decision for a young person, unless they're getting the education for fun, or are certain that thay will have someone to sponsor their lifestyle afterwards (most of my alumni became mail order brides or housewives by the way, and some ended up working in completely unrelated fields, such as medicine). It's also my opinion, as someone qualified to teach languages (a BS degree, neverheless) that Duolingo combined with Youtube currently by far outperforms most college courses if the person is motivated and it's free.

I agree with you about the value of learning English and Spanish as second or third languages given their popularity. English is the most spoken language and I think Spanish is the third or fourth most spoken language on the planet.

In my opinion, if you are going to spend years at a time in a foreign country, it will always be very helpful to learn to read, write and speak the local language. Especially when a very low percentage of the population speak and understand anything other then their native language as is the case in Russia.

I forgot about dress up on game days.

The good old days.