Honestly, not really, no. Speaking as someone who has had a handful of languages at a handful of proficiencies under his belt over his life, I don't really think learning any of them have "expanded my consciousness" or anything like that by any considerable degree. Sorry to burst your bubble. I learned English, Spanish, and Latin as a teenager, and currently am about 4 years deep into learning Finnish, so I speak with some lived experience on this.

If you want to think interesting thoughts, you need to think hard about things for a long time. That's the sine qua non of it. It can be in any language you want, or even in a nonlinguistic substrate like mental visualization. I would heavily caution people away from trying to shortcut this process by first spending 5 years studying e.g. ancient Assyrian and only then attempting to commune with pre-biblical demons (or whatever it is people think they want to do with this - if there's no particular goal in mind, I would say that's yet another red flag).

In general, I'm sorry to say, I think language learning is a tremendous waste of time and effort for almost everybody. Exceptions are mainly for hobbyists (even then, there are probably much more worthwhile hobbies you could take up), passing regulatory hurdles (all of mine so far), and integrating into a new culture (Finnish alone so far). If you want a pastime which will really push your brain to think hard and in new ways, philosophy and mathematics are both much better bang for your buck.

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jamager 3 days ago | parent [-]

> In general, I'm sorry to say, I think language learning is a tremendous waste of time and effort for almost everybody

I take from that that you dont like Finnish, you learn it because you have to, and your level is not good enough yet to participate in society exclusively in Finnish.

Nothing wrong with that, but you are generalizing a lot from a very specific context.

A lot of profient L2 speakers will tell you that L2 learning is a very enriching experience indeed.

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hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago | parent [-]

You have taken me entirely and completely wrong on so many points I don't know where best to start. But let's start with your ad hominems. To hammer home the generality of this argument I will replace all mentions of an L2 language with a randomly selected one from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages .

* I neither like nor dislike [roll - Tibetan]. I feel about the same way towards [roll - Kalaallisut] as I feel towards all languages, including my native [roll - French].

* I have always had a strong distaste for language learning in general, starting with [roll - Nauruan] when I ~4 years old. But I don't think that distaste is at all uncommon - it's just the obvious ugh reaction anyone would get to something which takes tens of thousands of hours with little to no concrete payoff.

* My level is good enough to "participate in society exclusively in [roll - Khanty]", but I admit it would take at least a few months of immersion I'm simply not interested in doing. However, this kind of statement is like saying "don't worry, tennis becomes fun once you make it to the professional leagues" - it makes the cost-benefit of starting tennis or language learning worse, not better, and much worse if we're talking about a strictly hobbyist approach. Very few other "good" hobbies are like this - 10 minutes of exercise a day, for example, has an astonishing ROI right from the start, if you're starting from zero.

* Your "enriching experience" comment leads us to an interesting question. Consider the group of all people who are C2 CEFR speakers of both, say, [roll - Slavey] and [roll - Sami]. If the experience was so enriching, why are they all not immediately spending another handful of thousands of hours learning a new language? It can't be a monetary cost thing, because language learning is basically free thanks to the Internet. There's no good a priori reason to suspect only the second language is enriching, and the third would be worthless - that would be even weirder. So why don't we see more of them learning e.g. [roll - Zulu]? Because the enrichment isn't worth it. Anything you do consistently for thousands of hours is going to enrich your life, but I would far rather spend those 10,000 hours becoming e.g. a world level Olympic tennis player than a pretty darn good speaker of [roll - Fijian].

	▲	jamager 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I apologize for the ad hominems. 1. You don't need to learn hundreds of random languages in order to claim you like languages. Most people feel attracted by some languages and not others, so your generalization point doesn't make any sense. 2. For most people I know language is fun once they start to communicate meaningfully, no need to be on the professional leagues. 3. Some people likes to learn a bit of many languages, others like to learn a ton of just two, others don't have enough time to learn as much as the would like, others like languages but maybe also likes sports as much. Even then, almost 1/2 of world population is bilingual and ~1/6 speaks more than 2 languages. 4. The overwhelming majority of people has the tremendous skill of being able to enjoy something in spite of not having any immediate payoffs. Otherwise no one would be doing difficult things of any kind and we all would be great at filling tax forms.