[silencio]

Agreed. Even worse are the comments talking about how difficult Mandarin/Chinese is to learn compared to English, so let's just stick to Spanish and French. Well, I wonder just how many people learned English or a similar language as their first language. Some people fluent in some languages are going to find another that is completely different to be difficult. Welcome to reality. (Although if my high school foreign language classes were any indication, similarity of languages was something most people had a very hard time grasping...only a few could see that Spanish/French/Portuguese had some things in common and took advantage of that to learn languages faster. We had a mandatory Spanish 1/French 1 freshman year curriculum, and some people just struggled the whole year long and chose the language they struggled with less for the next year.)

> In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety of cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.

My first languages were English and Korean, and I had no difficulty whatsoever in a couple semesters' worth of Mandarin classes, and I'd like to think I can hold some kind of basic conversation in Mandarin and understand basic written Chinese text. The downside of trying to use my knowledge though, is realizing just how little i18n/L10n support there is in applications out there (for starters...TextMate completely fails because it assumes fixed-width - see http://img.skitch.com/20100724-kcjdt411djee6u59p4pc9x5qe6.jp...). If for that reason only, hackers should care :)

For what it is worth, I've taken a bunch of language courses just for the hell of it. Languages intrigue me, even if I never end up speaking it ever again (ask me how often I speak Spanish in Los Angeles....never...). I never did it for any economic advantage, I'm probably never going to spend more than a week of my life in China as a tourist, but it's interesting. I can walk around in Chinatown and understand what signs say, I know how to address people correctly, et cetera. That's all.