Apparently the new twitter debate is about how much you need languages as an historian. Like most people who got a history PhD but had zero aptitude for learning new languages (& horrible HS experiences of the same), I have mixed feelings about this.

I shifted to being a history major partway through college & after swearing off ever taking another language class, since my HS Spanish was perhaps my worst academic experience ever. Because of this, I have never lost a sense of playing catch up with my language skills.

So between my third and fourth years of college I took an intensive Latin summer program. It was not for me. I ended up retaking Latin from scratch, starting with two semesters at a great community college, then two semesters at a very expensive private university.

My Latin is Good Enough, meaning I can take a translation, find the corresponding Latin, and figure out if the translation is good enough for the purposes of my argument. Thankfully there are lots of good translations out there to work with, & you can work a whole career that way

Do I wish my Latin was good enough that I could sit down and just read the original Latin? Of course. Is that ever likely to happen? No. Is that fine? For me, it is.
You do need the language. You don't need fluency.

Considering how many articles I've read arguing over how to define what being able to read in the Middle Ages actually meant, I find it a bit odd that there are language purists. Seems to me to be a bit of myopia within the field, but whatever.

I sincerely wish my Old English was better. I only had one semester of it in grad school because that was all that was available. If I hadn't already had years of Latin & German, & a very understanding adviser, I would not have passed that language exam.

But again, I can work backwords through a translation to make an argument. For the kind of arguments I am making as an historian, that is Good Enough. I wish it were better, but again, fluency is not necessary to be an historian of the period.

Now here's where it gets tricky: my years (and years) of German language classes were a waste of time. Well, they helped a little when I was learning OE, but otherwise? A waste of time and a lot of money.

Yes, I passed the German exam on the first try (I am proud of that, the examiner at my program was notoriously hard). But I can't read German scholarship. At my peak I could have a decent, if slow conversation in German, and could read for pleasure. But academic German is brutal.

Let me give you a sense: my partner was a German lit major who took over a decade of German, including two study abroads in HS. She wrote complex papers in German.
And she can barely get through a paragraph of one of my academic medieval articles in German in an hour.

Academic German might as well be another language, as my native-speaking Berlitz instructor informed me. Most of the key terms aren't in the dictionary, and even the grammar is different. My partner would just tell me what the literal meanings of the compound words were & move on

I had to pass that German exam, so I guess it was useful in that way, but I never use my German. I wish I could read German scholarship, but ultimately, there's enough English language scholarship that I effectively don't have to. Horribly linguo-centric, but no less true for it.

So what this long diversion from grading comes down to: yes, you need some familiarity with your primary source languages to be an historian, but you don't need to be fluent, or even close. Secondary source languages are both useful & a noble ideal, but not required in all fields

How much you need the language skills as an historian is going to depend on what your research is.
And it is absolutely fine to tailor your research based on your language skills.