If you disagree then either you're being irrational or you don't understand the meaning of the word necessary.
Food in necessary. Tasty food isn't. Water is necessary. Owning your own house isn't.
I'd love to have great ability in foreign languages, and then to actually know how to speak several of them fluently. Having that ability would be interesting and useful. But I won't die, or even suffer tremendous anguish, because I am not so good at picking up languages.
What else do you think it's not necessary to know as a non-ignorant human being??
Perhaps your reading "necessary" as "necessary in order not be ignorant". The problem is that those are two different things. Necessary, full stop, normally means necessary for life, or at least necessary to avoid some horrible calamity.
If you do speak a foreign language fluently would you die if you lose that ability? Is it a massive calamity that someone in Kansas City doesn't know how to speak French? Of course not.
And even "necessary in order to not be ignorant", is simply false. The sum of human knowledge is vast. One can know far more than the average person, or even far more than the average well educated person, while knowing very little in many areas, including the areas represented by languages other than English. (This is not English chauvinism, you can also be very knowledgeable without being able to speak English, at least if your environment places you in the middle of many non-English speakers.)
Certainly knowing a foreign language, all else being equal, would in direct terms make you less ignorant, and would in indirect terms expose you to new things that would reduce your ignorance even more. But the same could be said about learning math, or physics, or economics, or practical skills in how to build or repair things. |
