A week ago I was chatting with some upperclassmen who claimed that because English is spoken in virtually every professional and academic domain, learning a foreign language as an American is a fruitless pursuit.
As outraged as I was, I understood their point. The dominance of English in the United States covers such a vast expanse that it is less of a priority to learn another language here than it would be in a different country. This reality, paired with the fact that an English education is semi-mandatory for the rest of the world, fuels the mentality of "Why should I learn when they already have?"
The way I see it, however, is that a language doesn't need to have a "practical" value to be a practical asset. Knowledge of a foreign language allows you to articulate your thoughts with a different economy of words, enlarging and adjusting your mind to new courses of expression. Without speaking the language itself, cultural concepts, colloquial expressions and implied word-meanings can get lost in translation.
Take Korean for example. Instead of the "subject-verb-object" construction that exists in English and most Western languages, Korean sentences are composed in the order of "subject-object-verb." Studies have shown that those who are fluent in such languages use their brains differently to put forth an idea, as the verb comes after the statement.
But it is not just about how the brain processes that makes language such a vital tool. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles conducted research which suggested bilinguals
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