A New Language
In the past few months I've been thinking of learning a new language, but it's so difficult to choose one! It's not only for fun, I want the new language to be the most useful one in my future professional career. What do you think? Shall I go for French? Spanish? Russian? German? Chinese? or Japanese?
If you consider Europe alone, there is no "most important" language. I guess French, German and Spanish have the same weight, even Spanish might come second to French and German. Bringing Iran and generally the Eurasian region into account, then Russian becomes very important because it's widely spoken not only in Eastern Europe (new EU members) but also in Caucasus and central asia too. Finally we have China which is huge and growing very fast, and Japan which is a modern society and the centre of socio-economic power of east Asia.
Someone argued that Spanish has the advantage of being the most widely spoken language in South America, but common how much of my life will be tied to that continent honestly? I can't buy that argument. On the other hand, I am not sure if I will be able to learn the Chinese hieroglyph ever in my life, which is a negative point.
What do you think? Do you know a second language (apart from English) from which you have benefited? Let's brainstorm.
it depends on your future work. For example for mechanical engineers learing Japanese lanuage has more priority comparing to other languages. japanese culture and related stuff are the current research in most of the universities in UK and USA. so learing their language seems to be intersting.
(at August 6, 2004 12:25 AM)
Top 4 languages in term of number of people who speak them are 1- chinese(Mandori) 2-English 3-Spanish 4-Hendo ! I do not want learn chinese that is for sue :))
(at August 6, 2004 03:43 PM)
forget about all those useless languages, and learn hebrew. that's the best choice.
(at August 6, 2004 03:59 PM)
I agree with Mehdi. It really depends on what you are up to and what you want to do in future. In Europe I would say learning French or German can have the highest return on investmen.
Spanish is widely used but my understanding is that it will be beneficial if your career has something to do with tourism. When it comes to financial matters and industry, German/French speaking countries are much stronger.
(at August 7, 2004 09:09 AM)
it depends on the future country of your residence and your career. If you're going to stay around Europe the core languages of the EU are French, German and English. After those as you mentioned I guess Russian would be an option too.
Japanese and chinese are also options but you would want to make sure that you would need them. I know about some Masters courses in business "with emphasis on China market" in the UK, in which student have to learn a bit of Mandarin! I guess Japanese is also very important in tourism, you get all these wealthy Japanese tourists wandering around the world.
(at August 8, 2004 01:56 PM)
As Europe it's not a close space, but just a part of the world, I think english will be the common language, the bridge that can bring together Europe, America and Asia.
But as languages change, and interact, and mix each other, I think that in one hundred years in Europe they will speack english with a little arab, spanish and chinese words.
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