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Money and Languages

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I wanted to talk about languages and money. Over the past few years, I’ve really wanted to take a big step outside of myself about the things that are important to me. I’ve always looked at languages or used to rather with some tunnel vision because I lived it. It was so much a part of my life. It’s been what I’ve studied. It’s been my career. It’s had big significance in my personal life and my leisure time. I love it, but really why should you, why should anybody else love it? And it’s a question that I’ve addressed in different ways in different areas. In the most practical sense for me, very short term was with my students. How do I make this experience effective, but also enjoyable, really a worthwhile experience? And so I was very focused on that.

Trying to get young people who may not necessarily be inclined to love languages, give them a really great experience. And I feel like I’ve found through that so many ways to help people learn languages that were really effective. And I also want to thank the polyglot community for that because they’re always sharing different ideas. Now they have a completely different take. The polyglot community are people who are passionate, who really want to learn. And of course, so many of the people that I’ve worked with aren’t inclined that way necessarily.

Money and Languages: College

So it’s been really fun to sort of have a foot in both places. So the polyglot community is so great about sharing activities and resources. And I continue to study languages on my own, and I adapt a lot of those experiences back for my students. And they’ve continually helped me improve, I think, as a language teacher, seeing it through that lens. So recently I’ve really tried to focus on languages, and money. Now I know that one of the speeches rather lectures, or however you want to call it, one of the things I preach about is how great languages are for money. And again, I see it through my lens. For years I’ve taught a class called AP Spanish language and culture, and the course is taught in high schools and it’s the equivalent of a junior level college Spanish class.

And they have equivalents in French and Italian, German, and so forth, and sometimes two classes. So conversation, composition, grammar, those sort of advanced courses. “Advanced”, because they’re not necessarily advanced, but they’re pretty far up there. They’re really good courses where you can really develop your skills. And what I discovered throughout my years of teaching was that while the course was difficult, you have to do seven challenging tasks and you have to really become comfortable with speaking a new language. A lot of big universities offer huge numbers of credits. So because they counted the upper level courses, as well as some of the lower level courses that passing the exam meant. And of course, this is different at every college and university.

But kids can get half a semester, an entire semester, these unbelievable number of credits when they take their exam score and present them when they enter university. And so that’s free money. I had one student get an entire semester worth of college credits, take a couple more courses, and you’ve got a minor. How amazing is that? And it’s one of the things that I felt and h...