At my university when I was attending, they were using PowerBuilder to teach object oriented programming. It landed me my first job at a big oil and gas company supporting a legacy app.
My first job was at a large casino as a systems analyst. The casino switched CMS software and went to an AS400 RPG based application named ACSC. I took it upon myself to learn the database of the application and also to learn RPG programming (shudder).
This lead to my first software development position at a large international bank.
I worked as an RPG developer for three years then I pivoted to SQL Server/C#.
So yes knowing a not so famous language benefited me.
You're being downvoted, but the original uncorrected title was "Ask HN: Did knowing /learning a not-so-famous language benefited you?" (copied and pasted from browser cache) and didn't have the caveat that this was not a programming question. So have an upvote for an interesting story in the spirit of the original question.
I'm by no means perfectly fluent in Irish, but I find it incredibly useful to have a language no-one understands to speak when travelling to maintain some privacy. My wife and I were buying clothes in a market Kathmandu some years ago, while haggling we were able to strategise without the stall holder knowing a word of what we were saying. Once we were done (and had acquired some nicely priced clothes) the guy took us aside and asked what language we were speaking - turned out he'd learned off basic vocabulary (esp numbers) in a ton of the languages popular with tourists but had been left baffled by us!
You have to be careful. My cousin and his friends were being rather rude (in Irish) about a woman on a Belgian train, she managed to keep a straight face throughout, before lambasting them before leaving.
Ach, ar aon nós, táim an-shásta bheith ag léamh faoi Ghaeilge ar hn. N'fheadar liom cé mhéad atá anseo a bhfuil in ann sí a labhairt.
That's not correct. The Council of Ministers, acting unanimously, decide on the rules governing the use of languages by the European institutions. Ireland (and Malta) would veto removing English as an official language.
Looking back at your comment I take your point that it's surprising that a low speaker-population language might have a decent corpus to work from... unless that corpus is the entire legislature and discussion archive of a pan-European institution.
The thing with the machines, as far as I see it to date, is that they rely on good, professional human input, which is limited. So until everything that needs to be said is said, and translated professionally, current models are stuck just behind in the creativity stakes.
But when it comes to boiler-plate and repetitious texts, computers can absolutely automate that. Particularly if overseen by competent homo sapiens. It's just a crying shame that the dream of the babelfish dissuades people from translating their literature and business offers today, as we all wait on and on for that point in time. A wait that could be a very long time, while human translators sit waiting for the middle-man agency to send another highly marked up project. (You may have guessed; I'm working on a related thing.)
Now, neural networks and massively parallel machine learning, that's a different story... If the machine manages to infer meaning and work within the confines of acceptable grammar use, it's game, set and match to the singularity.
My first girlfriend was fluent in ~5 languages and conversant with a couple more (she was a Swedish Finn, so there's 3 languages effectively from birth) so had multiple stories about overhearing conversations she wasn't meant to understand.
Was once hanging out with my wife in the lobby of an Israeli-owned hotel in Costa Rica (lots of Hebrew and Spanish with some English). Two young female French backpackers stopped in for about ½ hr, sat nearby and started speaking French to each other. My French was quite rusty but it became clear at some point that I was the topic. Eventually they got up, and one, without really looking, said "au revoir, monsieur". To this day I regret not replying in kind just to see the reaction on their faces.
Over the past year my wife and I have learned Esperanto to near-fluency. However contrary to the goals of the language, it is a quite effective "secret language" when we don't wish to be understood.
> Ach, ar aon nós, táim an-shásta bheith ag léamh faoi Ghaeilge ar hn. N'fheadar liom cé mhéad atá anseo a bhfuil in ann sí a labhairt.
I've wanted to learn it properly since I took classes in Paris, but never really dedicated enough resources to it. I still enjoy watching TG4 and listening to RnaG/Failté from time to time but never went the distance. Swedish and French, being so closely related to English, they came much faster :)
I can just about hack my way through the national anthem, for no good reason other than it's a cracking song. Maybe when all my free time isn't spent on 'asset building' I'll get back into some of the fun stuff!
Tell me, how do you get on with (Scottish) Gaelic? I understand there's a large degree of mutual intelligibility between certain dialects and it'd be a fascinating area to study, like Welsh/Cornish/Breton also. I've seen some BBC Alba programming aimed at music-lovers/youth where an Irish performer was interviewed in Scottish Gaelic, replying in Irish. How set-up it was, I don't know.
You could pick it up quite quickly. I haven't seen or heard much Gaelic but I could get the gist of the stuff inscribed in the stonework around the city of Edinburgh from my Irish.
I've watched a couple of programmes on BBC Alba, and understood a good bit. It was somewhat like hearing Dutch as a German speaker, except maybe easier.
Thanks, that's really cool. I'll try to make head or tails of the article and look a bit more into the reunification. If that could be carried off, interest levels in the language(s) would potentially rocket.
The example I thought of for mutual-intelligibility btw was Swedish/Norwegian/Danish - but perhaps it's not that close? With Swedish as a third language I can still understand most Norwegian TV in general use or those subject areas I'm more familiar with.
I tried to learn Japanese once, only for half a year.
I think it benefitted me, even if I didn't learn much.
It let me look a bit deeper into Japanese culture. The politeness is baked deeply into the language and the sheer amount of Kanji told me that a Japanese person has to constantly be on track to not forget even the most important ones.
On the other hand Japanese seemed antiquated. 3 sets of symbols and one of them has thousands of items. The gramma seems kina straight forward, but the sentences simply get too long fast.
I speak German and English, which aren't drastically different. But while learning Japanese I found out how different languages really can be.
English is a bit compacter than German, no "der/die/das", just "the". Most words are not capitalized, no compound words, etc. but English is A LOT compacter than Japanese.
I studied only an entire year (2 semesters), and I have a fairly different view of Japanese. A Japanese person exerts no more effort to 'be on track' with their native language than anyone else. I'm not sure what you mean about sentences getting too long too fast. As a first semester student, perhaps more experience would better-inform your sense of sentence complexity.
Japanese expends a lot more syllables to say the same thing that English can say in fewer. Even more if you use the polite form (e.g., speaking in a business context, train announcements, etc.) Grandparent post was not the first person I've observed to notice this.
Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.
No no no. Finish is a machine gun language. And a broken one at that. Everything sounds like ratatata ta ta.
PS: Too long working for Nokia, I guess. ;)
Finnish and Japanese have enough in common (agglutinative, SOV word order, double consonants and vowels) that some linguists think they might be distantly related.
Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.
Not so much for reading, but in Japan I actually saw quite a few places that were offering lessons to teach people how to become better at writing kanji, since the vast majority of communication is over phones and through computers where simply knowing the reading and having a decent idea of what the correct kanji looks like will suffice
Also in college every single one of my Japanese friends had a business keigo book they were constantly studying in their senior years to prep them for communicating in the working world.
And this is just a simple example. Often the sentences get even longer when set in past tense or in some of the "politeness forms".
Maybe that's the reason they use these symbols, they allow for compact writing of even long sentences.
On the other hand, the Japanese I met didn't really "talk" the way I learned it at university. Noone said stuff like "Are wa nan desu ka", they just said "Are wa?"
Fluent or just basic? Personally I think it's not worth it unless you really commit to trying to get fluent. I "learnt" Latin + French at school and it's basically useless knowledge that's drifted away in the years, I can barely understand even the most basic French now.
As for knowing it fluently, my Mum and various of her friends are all Dutch living in the UK. Many of them earned some money from it in some way, including:
- doing translations
- getting jobs in the local port because they were bilingual
- teaching night classes in the language
- emergency translator for customs
And that's Dutch, where even 20 years ago a lot of them spoke English fluently. It can be useful.
My friend's wife is a US Bulgarian who speaks French and got a grant from her uni to go to Bulgaria this summer to interview Bulgarian software companies (I think including Chaos/XCom maker Julian Gollop who lives there now).
Then again I know others who never use their 2nd or 3rd language.
Basically, it opens doors to experiences if you want to leverage it.
It baffles me how anyone can consider Latin 'useless knowledge'. I know of no other language which opens so many doors to so many European languages, and most certainly to English as a second one.
Hear, hear! It can help with vocabulary, especially if you know a little bit about how things changed on their way to some Romance language you're trying to communicate in, e.g. working your way back from Spanish "hongo" to Latin "fungus" (the "f" -> "h" switch is pretty common, e.g. ferrum -> hierro, facere -> hacer).
Latin grammar doesn't help you with English grammar, of course. Latin vocabulary can help you with English vocabulary, but the effort of learning Latin, then transferring that knowledge to English, is much larger than the effort of just learning English.
I had some Latin in school, and yes, from time to time it comes to mind when encountering a new French or Italian word. But even if you want to learn several Romance languages, I'd guess that just learning them and recognizing/exploiting relationships is easier than also learning Latin. It does add a common denominator, but it also adds a lot of cruft.
As a native Spanish speaker (who also speaks French and Italian and can read Portuguese), let me tell you:Latin is pointless. I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. But that's the way it is.
I'm at six natural languages now. I have worked in three of them and could immediately go to work in my field in a fourth. I could refresh the two others within weeks to a level where I could go to work in them, with some initial difficulties.
I would say that, to some extent, knowing several languages helps you with learning the next one. Not just if it has features that I already know from other languages, but also if it has new "WTF" aspects. Those become easier to accept.
What I mean is this. My last relocation was to France, for which I had to learn French. French has a bunch of things that make me go "WTF", but knowing that every language has such things makes it easier for me to shrug them off, accept that French is weird, and carry on. On the other hand, some other expats I know, who know fewer languages, question everything: Why does French do this or that? I have the feeling that some people get caught up in such issues and develop (or reinforce) an internal resistance to learning.
TLDR: Learning languages may make it easier to learn others by making you more accepting of weirdness.
Learning Latin in school helped me to understand what this grammar thing is. Before I didn't even understand/cared about the grammar rules of my mother language, so learning Latin did improve my German.
I made an effort to learn Dutch for around 6 months of last year. Although it's a well known as a language, it's only spoken natively by around 20 million(ish), so isn't massively useful outside of the Netherlands and Belgium, among a few other places in the world. My first language is English. I just wanted a second language under my belt and I enjoy spending time in the Netherlands. The problem with learning Dutch is, most people (that I came across at least) in the Netherlands are already fluent in English and from my experience it seemed like they'd much rather just speak to you in English. So to actually speak Dutch there, it's important to be clear that you don't want to converse in English and that you're trying to improve your skills. It was really important to me that I'd speak a bit of Dutch every day, ideally to native speakers. This requires a bit of effort (as I live and spend most of my time in England), but it's suprising how easy it is to either find Dutch people here to speak to and also online.
It benefited me in the sense that I ended up making some new friends out of it and had a lot of fun just learning (or trying to learn) a second language. I think learning a new language like this can open up some doors and can help you meet a lot of new interesting people you'd perhaps not have met otherwise. I'd love to pick it up again next year. So we'll see.
Same here. I started learning Dutch at university about 10 years ago and kept at it.
I can absolutely relate to your experience. At least in casual settings it's very difficult to speak Dutch because everybody will default to English upon realising you're not a native speaker.
I like Dutch culture and I'm in the Netherlands several times a year. In terms of benefits, knowing the local language helps with both navigating everyday life more easily and better understanding society.
For what is worth, it's true of all languages if you are a native English speaker - everyone wants to improve their English, and for them it's tiring trying to make sense of your attempts at speaking their language as you are learning.
Best thing is to pretend you are Finnish or Macedonian or something and say you don't speak English at all!
Your point is certainly valid for many people in many places, but in France I find it to be mostly false. Most people, even in computer science, will rather have me butcher French than switch to butchering English themselves.
I studied in Copenhagen and did some Danish courses which at the time I considered a total waste of time since pretty much all Danes I knew spoke perfect (if sometimes heavily accented) English. I used it once when I got lost in Iceland and the only person we could find in the vicinity was an old lady who didn't speak a word of English. Danish though, even as rudimentary as mine, was just fine.
As someone that speaks five languages (one of them being Catalan), I have to concede it's the less useful. And only get to use it when I travel back to Spain.
But that being said, I find that there's never a good reason not to learn a new language if you are in a situation where you're going to be exposed to it on a semi-regular basis. So if that's why you're considering learning Catalan, I would recommend you to go for it. Even though it's by far the least useful language I know, I still think it's been a rewarding investment.
Some reasons why I consider it was rewarding, in no particular order:
- It sometimes helps me infer the meaning of a word I've never heard/read before.
- I've read a some good books from Catalan authors.
- I sometimes enjoy playing a game where I try to find words that share the same root in most of the latin languages I know but not in one of them (e.g.: for 'window', it's 'finestra' in italian and catalan, 'fenêtre' in french but 'ventana' in spanish !). This seems dumb, but it's actually my favorite reason for learning new languages.
Learnt a bit malay and indonesian during my school time, I got hired as a programmer recently because I can code decently and translate english to malay/indonesian for the targeted countries.
Was stuck in the Paris train station at 5 AM at the end of a Eurail-pass trip. Needed to get a tram ticket to get to the airport in ~1 hr. Tickets cost €18 in coins, or a chip card; I had only paper money. After ½ hr of panicking, I found a shop that had just opened and I asked the shopkeep, while holding up a paper bill, what basic (and probably incorrect) French I remembered from high school:
I had a Japanese conversation course for only 1 year at the Japanese embassy in Berlin. I forgot everything except "tenki wa ii desu ne". Still it was a very good experience, because the politeness system built into the language is very interesting and there were many other interesting phenomena (like particles for count systems, topic marker, etc.) that helped me later for my work in the philosophy of language and semantics. I also learned a lot about Japanese culture in that short year.
Depending on whom you ask, Hungarian probably qualifies as not so famous -- although among linguists it's pretty famous, as unlike all its neighbor languages it's not Indo-European.
Learning it has indeed brought me amazing benefits, chief among them a Hungarian wife. :-) Seriously though, all human languages have qualities unique to them, and once you speak a second language fluently you realize that there are entire ways of seeing the world that are only possible to describe in that language -- indeed, I believe that for every single natural language there are things it's only possible to think or conceive in that language.
This is probably less significant if the language is closely related to your own, but one of the thrills of learning a very very different language is that it opens your mind to concepts you realize you'd never have remotely understood beforehand.
As an added bonus, Hungarian is quite beautiful, and the Hungarian capital city of Budapest is a fantastic town.
So, if you're asking because you are thinking of learning a not-so-famous language then I encourage you to go for it. But understand that without immersion you'll never get far, so make a plan to go live in a place where they speak that language, at least for a year. And once you get there, don't slack off: some great places with unusual languages can easily accommodate you in some more common idiom.
Sometimes it is just fun, I used to speak some Behasa (Malaysian and Indonesian or vice-versa) and it was helpful to read menu in local restaurant or be able to speak with locals. I picked up some Berber when I was backpacking in Morocco and it did open tons of doors in countryside.
But honestly it doesn't benefit me currently other than some trivia knowledge.
I came from several not-so-famous languages to learning English and I am not the right specimen for your questions. However, I wanted to say that learning a completely different language has changed my understanding of what communication is. I started understanding how spoken words are just tags to ascribe abstract ideas that both the speaker and the listener can relate to. At the same time, there are parts of the communication that gets lost and that's why people are not completely understood-something quite common in the internet. Learning a language can help bridge that gap in communication and most importantly, help an individual get a better perspective of the culture the said language is attached to. Because, as it is repeatedly said most of the human communication happens through body-language and tone alone which is only possible in a face-to-face interaction with good attention and focus from both parties.
I lived ten years in the Faroe Islands. You can do just fine with Danish, but learning to read and understand spoken Faroese was of course a great advantage. Too old to learn speaking it, but conversations where I spoke my mothertongue and the other part their mothertongue worked great.
Partly as a result of the current political climate, I've decided to try to learn Yiddish, which doesn't currently have a large number of native speakers, in the US at least. I've never been very good at learning languages (nearly failed French and Latin in high school (both required), took a course in Japanese that did not go well). But if nothing else, I can probably use it to annoy neo-nazis on the internet.
A friend of mine who has a passion for language tried to get me to learn Lojban with him for a while. It's a complete waste of time in terms of its usability. I have never even heard of someone other than this friend who has spent any time trying it out.
What is interesting about learning a conlang, especially one with such an interest in being unambiguous, is that it aggressively points out how weird language actually is. I'm a native English speaker and the sort of person who just shrugged by all of public school English via the "it sounds good" argument. I really have no conception of what the structure of English is except in my own ability to use it.
Learning even just a small amount of Lojban helped connect my ideas of natural language to similar ones in logic and semantics. It did so even more effectively than learning Mandarin has even though I've learned far more Mandarin.
I think if you're interested in turning your analytical eye toward your own use of language in order to better understand what does and does not make any sense about it then learning a bit of a conlang is probably a good bet. It's the next best thing to having a linguist friend.
I studied Proto-Indo-European and fit into a similar box. It's entirely useless, day to day.
But, because it's not one of the earliest languages, and because it's a reconstruction, it is as simple as it can be.
It can make it difficult to express some ideas, like "innovation".
But it does allow you to understand the function of grammar, and the way we are limited by the words we have. If you can't express it, then though you may be able to think it, you can never truly convey it to anyone else. You can give endless analogies and stories, but no one can grasp the idea until it becomes a word that they also think.
One last analogy of the journey this opened up for me: imagine that the word 'colour' never existed.
I grew up as a bilingual since early age. One of my languages was an ancient language only spoken by about a million people who all spoke other, more popular, languages rendering their own language pretty useless in economic terms. Yet there are few things I think this gave me.
I believe growing up as a bilingual with two completely different languages gave me an edge in learning other languages when compared to my monolingual peers. When we started learning a foreign language in school, my monolingual peers didn't seem to grasp just how different the languages can be. All through school they tried to apply the grammar and phonology of their native language to the language they were learning. For me it was always a given that even similar sounds like consonants are often vastly different, that words can be in whatever position they have to, not just where I'd like them to be. Though, truth be told, I had no preferences in that matter to begin with since I was constantly switching in my mind from one language to another with a different word order. I am quadrilingual today, and I am not even a big fan of learning languages per se.
This might be far fetched, but I think it also made me more organized and disciplined, or at least it helped to do so early on. This mental context switching forces you to pay attention to the details for one thing. For another, it also gives a sense of "protocol" early on. You understand that you should speak one language to some people and another to the rest. In process you see that this thing is even more subtle because you have to choose styles withing the same language to match the social situation.
Last but not least, knowing the languages gave an early access to two different and often clashing cultures. This, I believe, made me less judgmental and more accepting of other people, at least when it comes to cultures. Not because it was the moral thing to do, but because noticing all the commonalities and differences between people became an exploration on itself for me as a kid. I am genuinely curious about people that are different from me, either by origins or mindsets. Being a typical white nerd and health-junky, I am easily bored by other nerds and health-junkies, but give me an alcoholic and I can talk to him for hours straight despite never being drunk myself.
I'm going into year 4 of learning Vietnamese (75MM natives speakers vs English's ~400MM). I wouldn't say it's helped me professionally, but I do think it's benefitted me personally. If nothing else, learning a language causes you to meet lots of people you never would otherwise and makes it easier to empathize with people from a completely different background and culture.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadThis lead to my first software development position at a large international bank.
I worked as an RPG developer for three years then I pivoted to SQL Server/C#.
So yes knowing a not so famous language benefited me.
Ach, ar aon nós, táim an-shásta bheith ag léamh faoi Ghaeilge ar hn. N'fheadar liom cé mhéad atá anseo a bhfuil in ann sí a labhairt.
And Malta is another EU state with English as an official language.
https://ec.europa.eu/ireland/news/statement-on-behalf-of-the...
The thing with the machines, as far as I see it to date, is that they rely on good, professional human input, which is limited. So until everything that needs to be said is said, and translated professionally, current models are stuck just behind in the creativity stakes.
But when it comes to boiler-plate and repetitious texts, computers can absolutely automate that. Particularly if overseen by competent homo sapiens. It's just a crying shame that the dream of the babelfish dissuades people from translating their literature and business offers today, as we all wait on and on for that point in time. A wait that could be a very long time, while human translators sit waiting for the middle-man agency to send another highly marked up project. (You may have guessed; I'm working on a related thing.)
Now, neural networks and massively parallel machine learning, that's a different story... If the machine manages to infer meaning and work within the confines of acceptable grammar use, it's game, set and match to the singularity.
Over the past year my wife and I have learned Esperanto to near-fluency. However contrary to the goals of the language, it is a quite effective "secret language" when we don't wish to be understood.
I've wanted to learn it properly since I took classes in Paris, but never really dedicated enough resources to it. I still enjoy watching TG4 and listening to RnaG/Failté from time to time but never went the distance. Swedish and French, being so closely related to English, they came much faster :)
I can just about hack my way through the national anthem, for no good reason other than it's a cracking song. Maybe when all my free time isn't spent on 'asset building' I'll get back into some of the fun stuff!
Tell me, how do you get on with (Scottish) Gaelic? I understand there's a large degree of mutual intelligibility between certain dialects and it'd be a fascinating area to study, like Welsh/Cornish/Breton also. I've seen some BBC Alba programming aimed at music-lovers/youth where an Irish performer was interviewed in Scottish Gaelic, replying in Irish. How set-up it was, I don't know.
There has been talk of an "Idir-Ghaeilge" reunified language. The Irish online magazine Nós had a nice article on this recently http://nos.ie/gniomhaiochas/teanga/idir-ghaeilge/ (in Irish).
Could become a reality in the unlikely but beautiful event of a post-Brexit Scotland uniting with Ireland in the "Celtic Union".
The example I thought of for mutual-intelligibility btw was Swedish/Norwegian/Danish - but perhaps it's not that close? With Swedish as a third language I can still understand most Norwegian TV in general use or those subject areas I'm more familiar with.
I think it benefitted me, even if I didn't learn much.
It let me look a bit deeper into Japanese culture. The politeness is baked deeply into the language and the sheer amount of Kanji told me that a Japanese person has to constantly be on track to not forget even the most important ones.
On the other hand Japanese seemed antiquated. 3 sets of symbols and one of them has thousands of items. The gramma seems kina straight forward, but the sentences simply get too long fast.
I speak German and English, which aren't drastically different. But while learning Japanese I found out how different languages really can be.
English is a bit compacter than German, no "der/die/das", just "the". Most words are not capitalized, no compound words, etc. but English is A LOT compacter than Japanese.
Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.
Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.
Also in college every single one of my Japanese friends had a business keigo book they were constantly studying in their senior years to prep them for communicating in the working world.
German: Was ist das? (3)
Japanese: Are wa nan desu ka. (5)
And this is just a simple example. Often the sentences get even longer when set in past tense or in some of the "politeness forms".
Maybe that's the reason they use these symbols, they allow for compact writing of even long sentences.
On the other hand, the Japanese I met didn't really "talk" the way I learned it at university. Noone said stuff like "Are wa nan desu ka", they just said "Are wa?"
As for knowing it fluently, my Mum and various of her friends are all Dutch living in the UK. Many of them earned some money from it in some way, including:
And that's Dutch, where even 20 years ago a lot of them spoke English fluently. It can be useful.My friend's wife is a US Bulgarian who speaks French and got a grant from her uni to go to Bulgaria this summer to interview Bulgarian software companies (I think including Chaos/XCom maker Julian Gollop who lives there now).
Then again I know others who never use their 2nd or 3rd language.
Basically, it opens doors to experiences if you want to leverage it.
I had some Latin in school, and yes, from time to time it comes to mind when encountering a new French or Italian word. But even if you want to learn several Romance languages, I'd guess that just learning them and recognizing/exploiting relationships is easier than also learning Latin. It does add a common denominator, but it also adds a lot of cruft.
I would say that, to some extent, knowing several languages helps you with learning the next one. Not just if it has features that I already know from other languages, but also if it has new "WTF" aspects. Those become easier to accept.
What I mean is this. My last relocation was to France, for which I had to learn French. French has a bunch of things that make me go "WTF", but knowing that every language has such things makes it easier for me to shrug them off, accept that French is weird, and carry on. On the other hand, some other expats I know, who know fewer languages, question everything: Why does French do this or that? I have the feeling that some people get caught up in such issues and develop (or reinforce) an internal resistance to learning.
TLDR: Learning languages may make it easier to learn others by making you more accepting of weirdness.
It benefited me in the sense that I ended up making some new friends out of it and had a lot of fun just learning (or trying to learn) a second language. I think learning a new language like this can open up some doors and can help you meet a lot of new interesting people you'd perhaps not have met otherwise. I'd love to pick it up again next year. So we'll see.
I can absolutely relate to your experience. At least in casual settings it's very difficult to speak Dutch because everybody will default to English upon realising you're not a native speaker.
I like Dutch culture and I'm in the Netherlands several times a year. In terms of benefits, knowing the local language helps with both navigating everyday life more easily and better understanding society.
Best thing is to pretend you are Finnish or Macedonian or something and say you don't speak English at all!
Your point is certainly valid for many people in many places, but in France I find it to be mostly false. Most people, even in computer science, will rather have me butcher French than switch to butchering English themselves.
But that being said, I find that there's never a good reason not to learn a new language if you are in a situation where you're going to be exposed to it on a semi-regular basis. So if that's why you're considering learning Catalan, I would recommend you to go for it. Even though it's by far the least useful language I know, I still think it's been a rewarding investment.
Some reasons why I consider it was rewarding, in no particular order: - It sometimes helps me infer the meaning of a word I've never heard/read before. - I've read a some good books from Catalan authors. - I sometimes enjoy playing a game where I try to find words that share the same root in most of the latin languages I know but not in one of them (e.g.: for 'window', it's 'finestra' in italian and catalan, 'fenêtre' in french but 'ventana' in spanish !). This seems dumb, but it's actually my favorite reason for learning new languages.
"Avez-vous du coin?"
Caught the plane with 3 minutes to spare.
Learning it has indeed brought me amazing benefits, chief among them a Hungarian wife. :-) Seriously though, all human languages have qualities unique to them, and once you speak a second language fluently you realize that there are entire ways of seeing the world that are only possible to describe in that language -- indeed, I believe that for every single natural language there are things it's only possible to think or conceive in that language.
This is probably less significant if the language is closely related to your own, but one of the thrills of learning a very very different language is that it opens your mind to concepts you realize you'd never have remotely understood beforehand.
As an added bonus, Hungarian is quite beautiful, and the Hungarian capital city of Budapest is a fantastic town.
So, if you're asking because you are thinking of learning a not-so-famous language then I encourage you to go for it. But understand that without immersion you'll never get far, so make a plan to go live in a place where they speak that language, at least for a year. And once you get there, don't slack off: some great places with unusual languages can easily accommodate you in some more common idiom.
But honestly it doesn't benefit me currently other than some trivia knowledge.
What is interesting about learning a conlang, especially one with such an interest in being unambiguous, is that it aggressively points out how weird language actually is. I'm a native English speaker and the sort of person who just shrugged by all of public school English via the "it sounds good" argument. I really have no conception of what the structure of English is except in my own ability to use it.
Learning even just a small amount of Lojban helped connect my ideas of natural language to similar ones in logic and semantics. It did so even more effectively than learning Mandarin has even though I've learned far more Mandarin.
I think if you're interested in turning your analytical eye toward your own use of language in order to better understand what does and does not make any sense about it then learning a bit of a conlang is probably a good bet. It's the next best thing to having a linguist friend.
But, because it's not one of the earliest languages, and because it's a reconstruction, it is as simple as it can be.
It can make it difficult to express some ideas, like "innovation".
But it does allow you to understand the function of grammar, and the way we are limited by the words we have. If you can't express it, then though you may be able to think it, you can never truly convey it to anyone else. You can give endless analogies and stories, but no one can grasp the idea until it becomes a word that they also think.
One last analogy of the journey this opened up for me: imagine that the word 'colour' never existed.
Describe the Northern Lights.
I believe growing up as a bilingual with two completely different languages gave me an edge in learning other languages when compared to my monolingual peers. When we started learning a foreign language in school, my monolingual peers didn't seem to grasp just how different the languages can be. All through school they tried to apply the grammar and phonology of their native language to the language they were learning. For me it was always a given that even similar sounds like consonants are often vastly different, that words can be in whatever position they have to, not just where I'd like them to be. Though, truth be told, I had no preferences in that matter to begin with since I was constantly switching in my mind from one language to another with a different word order. I am quadrilingual today, and I am not even a big fan of learning languages per se.
This might be far fetched, but I think it also made me more organized and disciplined, or at least it helped to do so early on. This mental context switching forces you to pay attention to the details for one thing. For another, it also gives a sense of "protocol" early on. You understand that you should speak one language to some people and another to the rest. In process you see that this thing is even more subtle because you have to choose styles withing the same language to match the social situation.
Last but not least, knowing the languages gave an early access to two different and often clashing cultures. This, I believe, made me less judgmental and more accepting of other people, at least when it comes to cultures. Not because it was the moral thing to do, but because noticing all the commonalities and differences between people became an exploration on itself for me as a kid. I am genuinely curious about people that are different from me, either by origins or mindsets. Being a typical white nerd and health-junky, I am easily bored by other nerds and health-junkies, but give me an alcoholic and I can talk to him for hours straight despite never being drunk myself.