Should one study a language any further?
I was raised to be bilingual, as most people born in HK were. When HK's sovereignty was handed back to the mainland Chinese, Mandarin became another compulsory language subject. So after a forced introduction and attempt by the education there and then to make me trilingual at primary school level, I thought it would be a great idea to take up Japanese in high school. I did that since one of my three preferences for my electives did not have enough people to start a class...so I had to choose something else. That was probably a bad idea, by the second year of my studies, I barely had any interests in it. The class was not fun, the teacher was not great...I passed the course with average marks.
Skip pass senior years, and about five years later - I thought I'd try again at uni. I liked it better this time and the teacher made the learning experience much more interesting. This time I chose the subject on purpose rather than as an alternative. With my heart set on living in London after uni, I went and did French as well. I dabbed on it in high school as most people in Australian high school did, and I love the romantic language, but in hindsight the new grammar and vocabulary was a bit much for my brain.
I can express myself and understand enough as a poor Japanese and French speaker, and every time I go to Japan, or a French speaking country I feel ashamed for not knowing more and that I had discontinued my extra language studies. I would love to be fluent in those, but it certainly takes a lot of time and hard work. One would need to be in an environment that you would use it somewhat regularly, which I no longer do with Chinese but I try to renew my mind here and there by reading the news, short stories and Chinese horoscopes. You'd need to be confident enough to communicate with others in a new language too. I admit I'd get a bit frozen when someone talks to me in a different language, my brain needs a second to switch to the correct receiving channel.
Further to the above, in an age where technology is prominent, with speaking apps and scanning devices that provides instant translations (though not super accurate for now, but gets the point across), I wonder how purposeful and time worthy is it to learn a language to fluency. Technology may unexpectedly exceed the standard that Google translate offers today in a short amount of time. Would people rather have a computer or robot to do translation ten times quicker, if they can be more or less on par with human accuracy? I often think of these potentials when I have the urge to pick Japanese or French up again. Would the idea of being multilingual be obsolete? Would there be a need for such skills? It might just become a specialist hobby like exposing photos in a darkroom - not many people do it but it's cool if you know how.
I always want to learn more, and better understand the languages that I enjoy using. Though I wonder if I should use my time and money in exchange the gratification of having such a skill when the world no longer needs it in the near future?
