Skills in languages other than English can broaden the horizons of your world as well as the opportunities available to you in your career.

If you love seeing new places, language skills can help you make it part of your job in roles such as a travel writer or flight attendant. And if you like helping people from abroad on their own travels, language skills are an asset for hospitality industry professionals like hotel managers or tour guides. Many roles don't require complete fluency in these second languages, so even intermediate-level skills can help you get hired.

If you are fully bilingual, however, there are even more careers available to you. Translators work to convert texts from one language to another, with material ranging from advertising copy to novels to movie subtitles. If you want to use your fluency to bridge cultures in real time, interpreters do the highly important but challenging job of conveying spoken meaning between speakers of two languages, which can be an opportunity to work with high-powered public speakers, politicians, and even intelligence agents.

Finally, if the study of language itself is your passion, you can become a linguist and work analyzing the structure of different languages and how they are used. This specialized expertise is highly valued in industries including education, publishing, and the government.

There are countless reasons to learn languages other than English, but fitting traditional on-campus courses into your schedule (and/or your budget) can be a challenge for many learners. Taking online courses through Coursera can help eliminate these obstacles by allowing you to learn from the same instructors and course materials as on-campus students - but on your own flexible schedule, and at a much lower cost.

Within a given language, you can find courses at a variety of levels and areas - for instance, if you want to learn Mandarin Chinese, you can take Chinese for beginners or for intermediate learners. If your interest is more academic, you can take courses in linguistics, or even in archaeology if you want to study ancient languages and cultures.

Regardless of your area of interest, don’t have to sacrifice quality to learn online. With Coursera, you can take courses from great learning institutions from all over the world, including Peking University, École Polytechnique, and University of California, Davis.