There are many excellent reasons to study a foreign language. Nonetheless, school language teachers still struggle with how to answer students' question, ‘why should we care about Spanish or French or any other language?’ So we posted this question in our Answers section and compiled the web’s top 20 reasons for studying a foreign language.
(Following the guidelines of the National Virtual Translation Center, we’ve divided the motives for studying a language into three categories, personal, academic, and professional.)
Personal
1. Learn more about the world
2. Travel
3. Make friends around the world
4. Learn about your heritage and better understand yourself and your culture
5. For the love of the language
6. Discover literature, music, and film in other languages
7. Communicate with family and friends
8. Interest in another culture or religion
9. Challenge yourself
10. Emigrate
11. Communicate with new communities in your area
12. Find a foreign boyfriend/girlfriend
13. Help people who don’t speak your language, such as travelers
14. People who speak foreign languages are sexier1
Academic
15. Better understand your native language
16. Improve chances of entry into college or graduate school
17. Expand study abroad options
18. Become smarter
Professional
19. Increase employment potential
20. Better serve your employer (and get a higher salary) by communicating with foreign partners
If that isn’t enough motivation for you, The Higher Education Academy has a PDF with 700 reasons to study a foreign language.
While not necessarily reasons why you might decide to study a foreign language, learning a second language also has benefits for students, including higher standardized test scores on such tests as the SATs, LSATs, and GREs. Foreign language study also improves student’s abilities in reading, writing, and math. Students who’ve studied foreign languages are more likely to think creatively and have diverse viewpoints.2 3
Now that we've told you the reasons why, given you free study materials, provided you with language partners, and made it all free, you have no excuse for not signing up to study a foreign language on italki!
