belief

I'm going to audit language courses, I've decided. Has anyone audited courses before?

LaCielle

Only one country speaks Japanese: Japan
But Japanese just had an earthquake and now its filled with radiation

Dont think you should learn jap.

Number88

Spanish is another good language you should consider studying.

daretorun

If you want to do business w/the Chinese businessmen it's an etiquette thing to at least try to speak their language, especially if you're visiting China. You'll get a lot further if you speak in their language. We owe so much money to China that such things are important.

And face it, the US is in somewhat of an economic decline, don't kid yourself.

WoodrowWilsonJR

A poll about this actually appeared on the Wharton SPIKE homepage for MBAs and undergrads. Russian won by a landslide with 720 votes. Mandarin(Chinese) was second with 190 votes. Russian is definitely a bigger need because the Chinese upper class(aka the chinese business class) knows English pretty well.

Interficio

woooo, I feel confident then, in deciding to study Russian. Not just for utility, but for the access it provides to such an amazing culture... I also know ancient greek and noticed that the alphabet letters sometimes resemble each other. I hope I don't confuse them! belief, I'd like to audit language courses too, but don't know if I'll have time in college or whether I should, since I will be essentially doing three languages (classic- latin and greek, russian) and possible have a second major on top of classics. Italian and Portuguese are very appealing to me... And then there's the whole thing about actually relearning spanish (I'm hispanic and a fluent speaker, but have no idea about the grammar or even how to really spell some words because I arrived in the U.S. before grade school in El Salvador)

Long story short: I need to learn every romance language. :/

belief

good luck with that^ we can be business partners in the future!

dtothelu

I would suggest either Arabic or Chinese. Mandarin is very applicable seeing as how China will become a super power in the near future, however Mandarin will be very difficult to learn well in just 4 years if you don't do a lot of study abroad in China, and poorly learned Mandarin won't really be that much use. I would also think Arabic would be useful if you're doing military stuff. I'm not sure how difficult it is to learn with respect to Chinese though.

RaPvgood

China's economy is growing fast, within a couple of decades it's going to be bigger than America's. I would choose Chinese over Russian. I think that if China is the country of the future, so is the Chinese language.

barrk123

I think he has probably chosen by now considering a year has passed since he asked the question

Kel2012

Arabic.

But in general, it all depends. If you want an opportunity to work with the government like FBI, then I would guess it's Arabic. If it's DEA, then Spanish definitely[Mexican cartels]. If it's just for Military purposes, then again I think it's Arabic.

But that's not easy at all. Arabic and Russian are hard as hell.

If I could learn any languages other than the one's I already know English and Spanish. I would learn German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. But mostly just German and French.

asiewm01

I myself is a multilingual in Mandarin, English, Portuguese and Spanish with Cantonese as my first language.

There is no such thing as regretting to know more or wasting time learning, you will only knowing less.

When it comes to learning a language, you should try to analysis which language gives you the opportunity to practice with a fluent-non native or native speaker.

Since we are living in the US, the most popular second language among American is Spanish, many jobs in America will require it employees to speak both english and spanish well, and business that chose not to serve a particular group of people will only lose business and will have a worsening relationship with them.

The chinese always said, "it does not matter whether what the buyer understand what the seller wants but a seller must understand the buyers, this way he can foster a positive relationship."

Think about this, for example, one day, a chinese customer came to your place to buy a product and you speak his language and understand him and his culture from the inside and out. If i am that chinese person, I will definitely spread the news and recommend my friends and every chinese people i know to come and look for you to serve all of us. They will be so happy with your service that they are willing to give you more money because they like you more. Does that make sense ?

Ok, enough of this talk, the next most useful language will be Mandarin and Arabic. Japanese is good if you want to work mostly in Japan and Russian if you want to have a mail order bride :P.

From my experience, learning mandarin can set you on the path to learn other East Asian language Vietnamese, Cantonese, Japanese and even Korean, because Asian Language developed base on Han Chinese Character as China is always the centre of power in Asia. The only tough part about chinese is pronunciation, this can go away, once you know how to grasp the tone and stuff, the word order is quite similar to English and have no conjugation and verb, there is no alphabet to be learnt, so you can totally skip the alphabet stuff and go straight to memorizing chinese vocabulary and character.

So overall it is very easy to learn and not as difficult as many people make it out to be. Because these people have never bother to learn and understand Chinese.

My friend learn Korean and Japanese, so word order in japanese and korean are similar to each other but different from english. Sure, it is easy to pronounce but the grammar may not make sense to you and they do have an alphabet system and such.

So my best advice to you when it comes to learning a new langauge is this, learn to write first and learn one word a day, this way you will learn a lot faster. Do not worry about speaking and listening yet because you are not living in a country that is surrounding by native speaker of that particular langauge all the time. You still need someone to teach you how to speak and if you already know how to write by the time, you find someone to teach you how to speak, you pretty keep the whole process of learning the basic which can save you a lot of time and trouble

Get to know more native speaker of that langauge through skype and internet and try write to them in that language whenever you get the chance.

Do not sit there and think about it, just do it. I hope my advice can help.

SupremeJustice

If you know Russian well, the CIA will recruit you. True story. But if you know Chinese, that's more helpful in the business sense.

ThereseR

SupremeJustice,

From where did you hear that?

invasion

So, why is Russian even in this conversation? The Cold War is over, you guys.

I would say definitely Mandarin, or Spanish, which for some reason isn't on your list. However, unless you do a lot of extra work (e.g. immersion trips over summers), I don't think that 4 years of classes will make you fluent enough to conduct business in that language.

Do you plan to move to China/Japan/Russia when you graduate? If not, why do you think learning that language will be so useful for your career? If you are planning on staying in the States, the most useful language would be Spanish, I would think, considering the Hispanic population is one of the fastest-growing ones here.

Edit: did not realize this was a really old thread! But my points still stand.