On the issue of reading foreign languages, scholarship, and opportunity cost (leaving manners aside). While I would agree that one ought to consider one's own opportunity costs in deciding whether to read a text in its original language rather than in translation, I would point out that costs, in terms of scholarship, are too easily underestimated. First, because some authors are very difficult, if not impossible, to translate: Marx's dialectical terminology and language, for instance, is absolutely not caught in the English version (I cite some examples in footnotes to an article on Tugan Baranowsky's marxism, RPE April 2006), so that studying Marx in English often gives a misleading impression of his ideas. Conversely (I am told), the German translation of Keynes is pretty awful; or, again, the Italian translation of Sismondi at places makes him tell the opposite of what he wrote in French. Generally speaking, if one wants to carefully study an author, one ought to be able to read that author's language and to understand the subtleties hidden behind the expressions that author uses (as pointed out by Jesse Vorst); moreover, not everything has been translated. This may sound obvious, but Marx's example indicates that it isn't that obvious. Second, because ignoring a language may lead to ignore what has not been translated from that language, and this could mean entire chunks of history. For instance, if one only looks at the English language literature, one could (almost) claim that after the gluts debate and until 1936, Say's law was generally accepted in the academia, while in reality it was widely discussed and rejected, or at least explicitly set aside, in the non-English literature, out of which grew some of the most interesting business cycle theories in the two decades before WW1 (in the German-speaking area) or where the premises of economic dynamics were laid (Italy). This, of course, goes on top of Anthony Waterman's correct observation on the dominance of French in the XVIII century, to which one also ought to add that the dominant scientific language at the end of the XIX century was German --in economics to a lesser extent than in natural sciences, but some of the leading journals were printed in German. And academic journals specialised in economics were printed in French, German and Italian before the QJE, EJ and JPE were funded (see http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/essays/journal.htm). Daniele Besomi