Learning the Right Foreign Language: Your Ultimate Side Hustle
The numbers are shocking, and very much in your favor.
My return to learning languages began when I got serious about international optionality about 90 days ago.
It started March 26, the day Trump announced a 25% across-the-board tariff on all imported cars. That same day, we first saw the video of the Turkish Tufts child psychology graduate student getting snatched-and-grabbed by masked ICE agents (because she signed a letter to the editor of her campus newspaper).
Since then, as we all well know, a lot has happened.
Some of the tariffs are in effect, some are on pause. (Who can keep track, while munching their Doordash from TACO Bell?) Rumeysa Ozturk has been released. Which, of course, is good.
But I am still working on my languages every day.
I’d tried Babbel before, but just out of a daydreaming sense of “what if”. Like, “wouldn’t it be nice to retire in my early 60s, and live three to six months at a stretch in a pretty place like Villefranche-sur-Mer, or San Miguel de Allende?”
Without any particular urgency, I didn’t make it very far.
Then, one pretty perfect spring afternoon in late March as I watched a college soccer match, I decided that even being willing to try to learn any foreign language was a worthwhile quiet act of resistance against this modern revolt of the Philistines, our corn-pone Cultural Revolution.
So I paid Babbel a not-very-large sum, downloaded the app again, and got to work.
I started with French, because I admired how Macron had a sense of style, some Rafale fighters, and enough deliverable nuclear weapons to provide some genuine sovereignty for Europe. In a way that would make De Gaulle feel very vindicated, and proud.
I also started with French because France’s art, architecture, history, and food are so beguiling. And they are.
But Orange Mussolini kept at it, and I began to realize I might want to not only quietly resist (by doing worthwhile, beautiful, gratifying things Stephen Miller would not like — or even understand), but also want to leave, or even need to leave.
Could I get into France? Soon, to live permanently, if I needed to? The answer was maybe, but most likely not. While retiring in France is (still, for now) relatively easy for Americans to do, the financial lift (especially with the available non-retirement non-home-equity segment of the balance sheet, and without any extra income from employment) was tantalizingly almost-but-not-quite in reach.
So that left Latin America. Many choices, lots of affordability, many types of climate and topography. A choice of Spanish, or Portuguese. Without saying anything negative about Brazil, it seemed like Spanish would offer many more choices.
I got to work. For a while I continued French after beginning Spanish, and I finished the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) French level A1.1 in Babbel. Switching between two new languages within one day was difficult, and as current events accelerated with the tariffs and capital flight, I decided to put French on pause.
I’ll come back to French, somehow, once my Spanish is where I need it to be. While I was more actively focused on French, I found the remarkable
by .She does such a nice job — an inspired one, really — and for any of you who are learning French for practical or impractical reasons, you really should spend some time on her Substack. (One of my favorite posts by Morgane about the entire enterprise and approach to self-taught language learning is below.)
That left me with Spanish, and I was motivated to make progress. Yesterday, sixty-seven days after I started, I finished Level A2!
There is so much more to learn, but biting off little bits of 15 to 30 minutes a day on Babbel for 67 days in a row has gotten me to what would be more or less the end of high school Spanish II.
I feel great about this start, and I’m going to keep at it. Babbel is actually pretty fun, and the curriculum goes through C1, with lots of supplemental lessons along the way.
I took five years of Latin in school, and I think that’s helping. Spanish evolved from late Latin, the “Vulgate,” and it’s been fun to recognize all the common elements.
The more progress I make in Spanish, the more I realize I held on to much more Latin vocabulary, declensions, and conjugations than I had thought. A lot of it was still there from over 30 years ago, lurking, ready to be called back to use when needed.
Maybe my Latin is like the National Defense Reserve Fleet — not all that much, but still, something from one’s past that still lingers, and might once again be useful.
So if you’ve stayed with me this far (thank you for that) I hope I’ve convinced you that learning a language is more fun and feasible than you might have expected. But is it worth it?
My instincts said yes - and I realized it wouldn’t be hard at all to but some quantitative discipline on that instinct. I enjoy Excel more than I should, so I put together a financial analysis.
So, how profitable is learning a language, really?
Knowing a language (at least “well enough,” even if one is still far from fluent) makes it so much more feasible to actually move and actually get out of a high cost structure in the United States (if you need to, or want to - for whatever reasons. (Not like there are any of those lately?)
If learning a language is what removes the barriers to slashing your costs, then those cost savings are your return on investment (ROI) for the work you did to learn the language.
The Cost Savings can be so “HUGE” you will get Tired of all the Cost Savings (and that’s not Fake News; Thank You For Your Attention to This Matter!).
I tracked down cost of living comparisons between the United States and Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, and San Miguel de Allende in Mexico.
(SMA is one of the more expensive areas in Latin America, and I chose it because by all reports it’s fantastic, and if the ROI on Spanish is so good in SMA, it’s all the stronger in so many other Spanish-speaking places.
If you want to play with the cost of living calculator, you can try it here.
The ROI on language acquisition that enables a geoarbitrage move with the attendant cost reductions is larger when you’re younger. (That’s because you have more years to spend living in the lower-cost place.)
The ROI is also higher in absolute-dollar (although not relative) terms when one’s income is higher, because the percentage cost reductions are applied across a larger initial income baseline.
Your ROI on language learning is also a function of how long you have to work to learn the language. The State Department (at least before it got pretty heavily DOGEd) provides estimates for the time involved here (cheat code: 600 hours for Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and 750 hours for German).
The results of the analysis are below, and I was shocked by the size of the ROI numbers.
A 47 year old earning a 75th percentile US income of $127,000 per year learning Spanish to live in Mexico at San Miguel de Allende receives a return on investment of $1,827 per hour.
Yes you read that correctly: $1,827 per hour. POST TAX. That’s insane.
The chart shows that the relative profitability of language learning, from smallest to largest is: (5) German; (4) French; (3) Italian; (2) Portuguese; and (1) Spanish.
I think anyone worried about current events or authoritarian overreach or AI taking their job needs to look themself in the mirror and admit:
If you are not studying a language, you are only a worrying ditherer, not a serious person.
Learning even German, the least profitable language, is equivalent to holding a full-time job that pays between $638,000 and $2.42 million per year, after tax!
Learning Spanish, the most profitable language, is a side gig with financial returns equal to a full time job paying between $3.65 million and $13.88 million per year, again, after tax (as if it matters whether it’s before or after tax when the numbers are that large…)
If anyone offered you a side gig that was that profitable, wouldn’t you take it? You’d literally be a self-loathing fool not to. Unlike other side gigs, you don’t have to outlay any more capital than your Babbel subscription, and you don’t have to acquire your second customer or client. You only need your first customer: yourself.
Every time you read a Substack about the regime doing another wretched thing, or yet another AI-maximalist paean to the purported techno-future, and you feel worried, take a few breaths, get yourself a cup of whatever you enjoy, find a quieter place, and do another language lesson module.
And know that you’re doing perhaps the best kind of self-care: something creative, hopeful, purposeful, and also pragmatic and yes, also wildly profitable, beyond your wildest dreams.
T.E. Lawrence wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his account of the guerrilla insurgency against the Ottoman Empire in the Great War.
That book’s epigraph has always stuck with me:
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
Be dangerous.
Be a dreamer of the day.
Act your dreams.
Make it possible.
It starts with learning a language.
So resist effectively. Respect yourself. Invest in yourself. And get to work.
Do yourself a favor and check this out as an add-on to your language learning efforts. I know of two popular language teachers that swear by it. It’s quite amazing. https://youtu.be/yM4LEUzPnLs?si=v4zr6zTVPv5qfevE