[heylook]

Yep.

> [learning a language is] only helpful for high professional tasks or close literary study or prestige.

This is a person who doesn't understand actual face-to-face communication, like, at all. Even though translation apps are amazing, in a social interaction, there's no getting over the imposition of the halting, hesitant back-and-forth of device-assisted translation. Sure, you can almost always eventually get your point across, but you're never going to set the other party at ease in the same way as speaking their language yourself.

[DiscourseFan]

This means of communication is already outdated. If you live in an urban metropolis in the US and Europe especially, but increasingly everywhere, you cannot avoid using translation apps on an almost daily basis. I’ve had close intimacy with a partner whose language I barely spoke. The intricacies of language are suitable for technical tasks but language is something which is wielded at the bottom by force, the force of expression, of a gesture. The culture of the internet is building a language of its own with a non-linguistic grammar, as exemplified by memes which increasingly lack any immediately percievable linguistic content. And LLMs are the key to all this, they are the great mediator of the world, transforming any expression into any other. But the strength of the expression still lies in its use, far more than its content. Still, as I said, there is room for deep knowledge of the cultural intricacies intertwined into any particular language: but this is a regressive element in our expression, one which is being eliminated by industrial necessity.

[Auracle]

Sure, but how often does that happen in most people’s lives, especially in the US?

When they’re on vacation? Very few people are going to learn a language that they could use for a week or two in a place where people probably speak English better than whatever language you’re attempting anyways.

Obviously there are exceptions.