Learning a foreign language may soon be as obsolete as learning how to churn butter, writes Louise Matsakis in The Atlantic.
Total enrollment in foreign language courses at U.S. universities decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, she writes. Foreign-language learning is down in Australia, South Korea and New Zealand.
Artificial intelligence will accelerate the trend, she predicts. "Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one."
AI translation will be a boon to migrants -- and their teachers. But it has limitations.
"Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world — experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think," Matsakis writes. But it's hard and time consuming.
It's simpler to let AI do it, even if it the nuances are lost.
Of course, most students won't learn a new language well enough to understand the nuances, she concedes. "If professors accept that automated technology will far outpace the technical skills of the average Russian or Arabic major, their focus would ideally shift from grammar drills to developing cultural competency, or understanding the beliefs and practices of people from different backgrounds."
Some universities are closing foreign language departments as interest declines, reports Jennifer A. Kingson on Axios. "German declined by 172 programs, French by 164, Chinese by 105 and Arabic by 80," the Modern Languages Association reported. Korean, American Sign Language and Biblical Hebrew gained in popularity.