English is fast becoming the world’s universal language, and instant translation technology is improving every year. So why bother learning a foreign language? Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter shares four alluring benefits of learning an unfamiliar tongue.

First, To go into a culture and to only ever process people through that kind of skrim curtain is to never truely get the culture. And so to the extent that hundreds of languages will be left, one reason to learn them is that they are tickets to being able to participate in the culture of the people who speak them, just by virtue of the fact that it is their code.

Second reason: it’s been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. And these are factors that set in early, and so that ought to give you some sense of when to give junior or juniorette lessons in another language. Bilingualism is healthy. 

Third — languages are just an awful lot of fun. Much more fun than we’re often told. 

And more to the point, we live in an era when it’s never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher — some genius teacher in there — but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times. You had to go to class. If you didn’t have that, you had something called a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn’t work, that’s just the way it was.