{"id":12129,"date":"2016-03-04T17:10:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T17:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=12129"},"modified":"2016-03-04T17:10:33","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T17:10:33","slug":"the-future-of-language-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=12129","title":{"rendered":"The future of language learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/language\/articles\/futureoflanguagelearning.htm\">new article on Omniglot<\/a> discusses the future of language learning. The writer (not me) suggests that improvements in technology will soon make it possible to use machine translation in everyday situations and as a result, learning languages will become unnecessary and something people do for mainly as a hobby.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t really agree with the article. Improved machine translation will be very useful for tourists and other short-term visitors to foreign parts, but for people who live abroad or spend a lot of time in foreign lands, learning the local language and about the local culture will always be useful and worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>Translation, no matter how good, adds an extra step between the speaker and the listener. For those of us who prefer direct interaction with people, and who like to fully understand what other people are talking about, including their idioms, jokes and slang, there&#8217;s no substitute for learning their language.<\/p>\n<p>Even if a babel fish or similar device existed, i.e. something that translates whatever language you hear into your own language, and that translate what you say into your conversation partner&#8217;s language, it would still be worth learning about other and languages cultures. Or would it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new article on Omniglot discusses the future of language learning. The writer (not me) suggests that improvements in technology will soon make it possible to use machine translation in everyday situations and as a result, learning languages will become unnecessary and something people do for mainly as a hobby. I don&#8217;t really agree with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}