The Business: On Language & Professional Development

The other day, YouTube channel What I've Learned interviewed Matt vs. Japan about how Matt attained near-native level proficiency with Japanese.

TLDR: He adapted some proven techniques for swift language proficiency into a brick-to-face easy system, found here.

This matters for some simple reasons: it expands your reach professionally as well as personnally. Finding a way to do that exploits brain chemistry, human psychology, and known facts of language acquisition to create an easy-to-follow system to acquire proficiency and eventually mastery is a major breakthrough; making it freely available is a godsend.

And as I have ESL readers, they can testify to the core concept's validity of using Target Language media consumption to drive this process, something I've heard time and again over the years as being how other aliens and foreigners learned English- most recently being my former home health nurse, a Nigeria immigrant.

For my part, language acquisition is useful for professional reasons; it expands the array of primary documentation I can comprehend without reliance on middlemen to translate for me. If I wanted to do some serious research on, say, the influence of court eunuchs across various Imperial Dynasties then being able to read the records myself is as valuable as being able to converse with local officials, librarians, archivists, and historians (and their handlers) as part-and-parcel of that research process. Being able to translate my own works, or converse in other languages, is worthy in its own right but ultimately secondary to being able to read those records first-hand competently as if I were reading the letters of President Abraham Lincoln or letters between Washington and Lafeyette.

And if I become able to travel down the road, being comfortable outside the Anglosphere would be beneficial. As no one disputes that language development isn't professional development--just as professional diplomats and private agents--this is a valid business pursuit to consider, especially in an uncertain world.