Does easy access to the internet mean we no longer need to learn other languages?

As most people who have been through the UK state school system will know, language learning is, for many, a difficult process. Many adults will remember struggling through French lessons in secondary school, others will remember fighting the urge to fall asleep in a German class. Others still will remember the feeling of achievement after embarrassing their Latin teacher with a question about the number “six” – you know who you are. Nowadays, we as a society are caught in a trap: the younger generations – mine included – are being socialised into the idea that learning foreign languages isn’t as important as it used to be, on the grounds that the internet provides us with easy digital translation software. But is this a reasonable argument? Does Google Translate really mean we don’t need to learn how to greet our fellow humans in their own languages? Can we get away with not understanding the waiter in a Mediterranean restaurant, because “they all speak English anyway”? No. We can’t. And here’s why.

Why learn a language?

Most of us will remember the five key aspects of language pedagogy:

• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking
• Listening
• and Translation

On top of that, there’s also grammar. But these are by far not the only things we learn from a foreign language class. Through studying a foreign language, we provide ourselves with a window into the lives of different populations, and their respective cultures. By learning French, for example, we access not only metropolitan France, but also lots of nations and territories across the globe. There is at least one francophone territory on every continent – including Antarctica! So it is clear that the study has the potential to pay off, with interest.

But there’s more to it than that…

Indeed, beyond the cultural information learned through study of foreign languages, there are more general linguistic factors learned. We learn a lot of non-verbal cues through language learning, such as culture-bound reactions to particular facial expressions and hand gestures; we learn to recognise different sounds without hearing them, by developing our understanding of mouth shapes (this is known as the McGurk effect – the process whereby our minds are tricked into hearing different syllables if the mouth shaping is changed, even if the sound produced is identical); and we learn several different methods of making our spoken language more understandable – in our native language, just as in our target languages. For example, GCSE speaking exams are, on top of being marked on the content, usually marked based on spontaneity and fluency, as well as pronunciation and intonation. Is this because of the internet? No! We, humans, have developed these skills. That’s the benefit of language learning – we gain a deeper, more human understanding of the languages we speak, rather than just seeing the words appear on a page in front of us.

What does language-learning even mean?

So, as we can see, language-learning is more beneficial than we generally credit it to be. But we’ve barely even scratched the surface: language-learning can refer to many different things. We have so far only mentioned foreign language learning. But there are also different definitions of “other languages”. Consider sign languages – BSL, for example, is now recognised as an official language of the United Kingdom, and yet relatively few people in the country speak it fluently. It is therefore important that the language be learned, such that communication within the country becomes more straightforward for its users. The internet doesn’t lend itself to easily learning sign language, however. Whilst there are services which can help to teach the language through short videos and step-by-step diagrams, there isn’t yet an easy way to translate spoken language into sign language, save by stringing together these videos, but this could prove impractical in, for example, an emergency situation.

Issues with technology

Equally important to learn are programming languages. It’s all well and good to say that “we have the internet to translate for us”, but people don’t tend to consider that people need to programme the software to do this. Whilst programming languages cannot be used as a form of human-to-human communication, human-to-computer communication relies heavily on the ability to convert human concepts into a code which can be interpreted by a computer. This leads us nicely on to my next point, which is that humans need to be able to load a data bank with words and phrases, and their relative translations, so that digital translation software can function. For example, whilst Google Translate (other digital translation services are available!) provides quick and easy live translation of words and phrases between almost any two languages, it requires a huge amount of effort to make the software function in the first place. Especially with the current rapid development of artificially intelligent software, many people cite such services as an alternative to learning foreign languages, but without having learned foreign languages, the creators of these services would not have been able to provide this assistance.

The lesson?

Overall, it is clear that language learning is nowhere near as useless as many students make it out to be. Next time you type into your Google Translate box instead of thinking back to your French lessons, remember the team behind the screen. Remember how difficult it would be for you now, if these people hadn’t learned their foreign languages. And, most importantly of all, don’t perpetuate the problem. Try looking back through your GCSE German once in a while, and you never know, you might find that you remember more than you think you do.