It doesn't seem entirely appropriate somehow, lumping these two topics together in an article. For me, I happen to like both. With sports, I like to run, sometimes competitively, but with anything else I'm content with being a spectator (mainly of the couch-potato-in-front-of-the-TV type), with my preferred sports being soccer, baseball, basketball, and football. As for studying foreign languages, I am no gifted polyglot but instead am very interested in them, having studied several to varying degrees over the course of my adult lifetime, up to the present. As for how society regards these pursuits of mine, I find it interesting how differently they are treated...
With sports, one can be interested in many of them without actually participating in any of them. I can go anywhere and strike up conversations about what's going on in the current sport of interest, and being able to remember statistics and other facts only contributes to the discussions in a positive way. In fact, sports analysis can get to be quite abstract, if you check out the "standings" tables in your local newspaper and see the arrays of columns of numbers next to each team or athlete. That's quite a departure from actually being out on the field, court, rink, or track and actually participating in the sport yourself. With the study of foreign languages, on the other hand, my experience has revealed a different attitude on the part of others...
I don't have to be considered as an athlete myself in order to enjoy some kind of social acceptance in the context of being knowledgeable or interesting about sports. Yet with foreign languages, if the topic comes up with others, no matter what aspects of a particular language I'm talking about, the person I'm trying to communicate with almost inevitably personalizes the conversation by trying to elicit my fluency level and what am I going to do with my study of said language. Once, when discussing an aspect of Polish grammar with a fellow student in a Polish class, he refused to listen to me because that wasn't how HE learned languages (so why was he in that class, I should have asked). That was a negative interaction, but almost the entire rest of the time, people express disinterest in the more passive, impersonal analysis, acceptable with sports, whenever foreign languages come up for discussion. Instead, it gets real, real personal...and I don't like it. When I'm sitting there studying Vietnamese like I was once in a nearby Starbucks (where I also happen to be writing this article right now) and an acquaintance entering the store notices what I'm doing, I don't want the cop-out question "What are you going to do with it?", which is what I got at that time. Instead, why not ask, "Gee, what's Vietnamese like?". Now that would be a "sports"-like question inviting me to share my not-inconsiderable (but still very incomplete) knowledge about that language. And along the way in that "better" conversation, I would most likely slip in some personal information, such as that I used to work in a local Chinese restaurant that had several freshly-arrived Vietnamese immigrants whom I befriended and with whom we practiced speaking each other's native language...and I didn't want what I learned back then to slip away. I admit that most folks don't want to discuss languages on a more analytic level for the same reason they wouldn't want to talk about mathematical topics: they don't want to be shown to be ignorant in the area (and people, especially in this university town, are so, so excessively prideful about their levels of educational attainment). With sports talk, that doesn't seem to be a problem, though...
So if you see me studying a foreign language somewhere, you're welcome to interrupt my train of thought and ask the boneheaded, implicitly accusatory question, "So what are you going to do with it?", if that soothes your pride somehow. But instead, why not put me "off" the spot and ask me to describe the language I'm studying? Who knows, you'll probably end up finding out what I'm going to "do with it" anyhow, plus you might then actually learn something...as well as maybe, just maybe, find a new area in your life that piques your interest...
