How Much Does It Cost to Learn A New Language?

Whether you need it for work, or simply to connect with different cultures, there are many good reasons to start learning foreign languages. It’s cool to be bilingual or multilingual, but how much time and money does it cost to learn a new language?

Cost Effectiveness of Learning

Let’s say you want to learn Spanish. You may start off with some textbooks that are priced around ten to thirty bucks, then sign up for language courses that cost several hundreds of dollars a month, but if you can afford to study abroad, then you’d pay thousands of dollars.

Learning new languages also requires a time commitment. According to the Ten-Thousand-Hour-Rule by Malcom Gladwell, we need to have ten thousand hours to master any new skill. But what if you couldn’t see a return on your language training investment after you spent plenty of time and money? That could lead to less motivation or even more spending to seek better results.

As an expat, I started learning French by taking intensive classes for three hours on weekdays which cost me $800 per month. Though I made some progress, speaking French is still not an easy task for my Japanese speaking brain.

Working with Interpreters Doesn’t Mean You Give up

Needless to say, learning foreign languages is essential and there are many benefits including boosting your carrier, meeting new people, and building up your self-confidence. But becoming fluent in a new language can’t be done quickly; It takes months and years of dedicated study.

Using interpreting services such as Oyraa can help you break through the language problem and it doesn’t mean that you failed at learning. Rather than that, working with interpreters can inspire people to learn the language more. Whenever necessary, Oyraa can be a solution to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak your language while saving the time and money that you would spend to learn a new language.

Rina is our contributor at Oyraa. Originally from Tokyo, she used to be an account executive at a tech company but followed her passion for languages after attending conferences in Singapore and the United States. She has since then become a translator and has lived in Honolulu, Dublin and now Lausanne.