<p>Many colleges have a requirement to study a foreign language to the intermediate level. The usual rationales for this requirement are to gain a reading knowledge of a scholarly language in preparation for graduate study, to understand other cultures via their languages, or to interact with non-English speakers in some professional or career context. I was wondering how many on this forum found this requirement beneficial or useful. Did you learn enough to read the language? to converse in it? Do you still use it? Was it useful in your graduate or professional studies? In your career? or Was it a waste of time?</p>
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<p>Yes on all three counts. Without a requirement, I wouldn’t have taken the language. I would have missed out on a lot during my travels and studies, and would have had to learn it (plus another) later on anyways for grad studies. </p>
<p>One other advantage - I understood English better when learning the grammar and syntax of another language. I hadn’t really understood how a language works before studying a new one. Even if one does not plan on international travel, learning a second language stretches one’s brain and provides unanticipated benefits throughout one’s life.</p>
<p>I would agree that study of a foreign language helped me understand how language works in general. I’ve had few professional opportunities, however, to use the German I studied and 99% of the literature in my field is in English-language journals. I’m surprised how much German I still remember after all these years, though. </p>
<p>The question of the benefit of language study came up recently at an agency where I consult when they hired a new colleague, who is originally from Bulgaria. Though she’s been in the US for 12 years, she still has some difficulties with written expression in English. In Bulgaria, she studied Russian in school, and sometimes it is helpful if another of her colleagues explains things to her in Russian. The other colleague learned Russian in the military, though he never had an opportunity to use it in the military. They also have an intern starting soon, whose first language is Polish and he also speaks Russian. I learned the other day that still another colleague studied Russian for two years in college, though she doesn’t remember much of it. All of this is in a small department at a state agency in a small town in the middle of a rural state.</p>
<p>actually yes. I’m taking Latin, and this year we’ve been translating some authentic, original texts (with spaces and punctuation added beforehand- I’m not advanced enough to translate anything in it’s raw form). you’ld think that translation would be simple, but there are so many factors. words in other languages have conotations just like they do in English. plus, a lot of words can have different meaning, just like English. and there are so many ways to interpret things.
I’ve always had an appreciation for reading things in the language it’s written in, because a trnalsation never does it justice. and this has only enhanced this appreciation 
it’s also gave a nice understanding of how language works in general, and a bit on how language evolves. fascinating stuff.</p>
<p>Yes, it helped a lot. First because it opened my eyes to new cultures and new ways of doing things, and that made me realize how insular I was before I learned another language (and thus decided to learn another one). It made me better equiped to deal with a diversity of people, whether they spoke that language or not, simply because what I’d always taken for granted was shown to me as a simple cultural construction. Second it sharpened my analytical skills and third it made me better understand how English works. Of course it came in handy when travelling, it allowed me to discover books I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise, to talk with people, and basically made me want to travel. If you don’t plan on working in a mom-and-pop place, basically you’ll be surrounded by people whose first language is not English, a lot of whom are bilingual (i.e, speak English better than you speak any language) and that helps tremendously from a professional point of view.
Finally, while you’ll need to know languages for grad school, the basic language requirement in college doesn’t serve that purpose - you need MUCH higher proficiency than just Intermediate to function in the professional world or to read professional journals. The Intermediate level only allows you not to appear like a complete doofus when surrounded by diverse professionals who have all travelled abroad and/or speak foreign languages - of course, that depends on the level of job you hope to have and on where you’ll be living, generally the higher you go the more language you’ll need. (That’s why Georgia Tech has a campus in France, for example. Engineering often is in English, but the skills its engineers pick up from living abroad and learning a new language are invaluable.)</p>