Best language for an International Relations/ Econ major??

mathmom
Fri, 23 Jun 2017 01:56:23 +0000

If you know Spanish there’s no question French would be the easiest. (I speak that as someone who speaks French and German and studied a little Spanish one summer.) I liked German, lots of cognates with English, the grammar appealed to my mathematical mind, and while the grammar was more complicated than French I felt like there were fewer exceptions, and for me, at least, it was easier to get a good accent.

My IR son studied Arabic. He studied for four years, included an entire year in Jordan, but he’s not a natural linguist. I don’t think it helped him particularly. He’s now in the Navy - as far as I know they aren’t planning to use his Arabic knowledge, but it’s early days yet.