A few months ago, a certain thought stuck my mind when I saw a post made by this woman. I think she was in her mid-thirties. I don't want to recount the whole post, so the TL;DR version is how bad life is in Canada. And in that moment, while I was reading it, I felt some sort of deja-vu. A lot of people complain about their life, and in most cases, they blame the government. And I find it funny because there's at least one type of person who learns a foreign language by design, longing to find a better place in this world. People either want to move to a more advanced country or a Third World country. In the first instance, they hope they'll be able to afford more stuff, for example, a state-of-the-art car, a good education, a technology-friendly environment or on the other hand, enjoy a better quality of life by keeping their job back home and working remotely in their new country. And recently, I've started asking myself if learning a language will at all pay off.

Some people think that knowing a foreign language is enough to make you successful in an advanced country. They come to this conclusion based on the fact that they'll be earning a higher salary, and they apply this new income to the cost of living back home. It seems people in other countries with higher salaries live better. But it's always hard to account for the whole range of services we use in our daily life. In one case, buying a car is cheaper in a foreign country, but getting an education and medical services can set one back exponentially. Eventually, these people spend five to ten years studying a foreign language instead of acquiring skill that'll raise their earning potential. I personally think if they had spent that time improving the skills they had to start with, they could be more successful in their own country and not have to move. It's awesome if your parents help you learn a foreign language as a child, but when you take one up in your 20s or 30s, it's definitely more of a challenge, in my opinion, due in no small part to the fact that you'll need to juggle language learning with your work, school and family. When you reach your 30s, in addition to the above, you may have the added responsibility of having to look after your parents and kids.

Even if people reach their goal of mastering a foreign language, they face an ugly truth after the moving abroad - all native speakers don't speak grammatically like in the textbooks; they often make grammatical mistakes. Upon making thos discovery, they wonder: "Why did I work my ass off this language?", with a tinge of bitterness. And even worse things can happen; for example, if they don't have any qualifications, they're forced to work a low-income job. This is where all hell breaks loose/things gets hairy. After living a few years in a virtual hell, they decide to go back to their motherland, having wasted the best years of their life. Of course, if a person was working in the native country as an engineer, scientist or Uber driver, they'd be feeling fine because the laws of nature work the same way in any part of the planet.

I could blame those wasted years on the propaganda with the beautiful pictures in movies and schools, from all those influencers on YouTube who promise to teach people how to speak a language in 21 days, all those scammers with their big talk about life in Paradise. You can live a happy life anywhere if you're not lazy. If you're just an ordinary person from an average family, you should carefully consider all the pros and cons before starting the journey of learning a foreign language. You should know exactly why you want to learn it in order to not be disappointed down the road. If you're already cruising on this path: good luck.