<p>Im looking to hopefully get two or more languages under my belt before applying to grad school. Which languages would not only look best on a resume, but help me in the real world?
My current major is political science with a minor in global studies. I plan on going to grad school for foreign policy.</p>
<p>Probably the most useful language, and the easiest to learn, would be Spanish. It is a good language to start developing and practicing language learning skills. Plus, there are a lot of people you could practice with.</p>
<p>The most impressive languages, and ones that would be good for grad school, would probably be languages that are nothing like English. Look for good agglutinative languages, like Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, etc.</p>
<p>English, and Spanish, tend to form sentences in a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) framework. Try to look at some languages that form sentences in an SOV framework, they are very interesting.</p>
<p>Although, whether or not they would look good on a resume, I’m not sure.</p>
<p>Do you have a specific region of the world that you’re interested in? Start from there.</p>
<p>What would be your opinion on Russian? I’m trying to view the world 10 years from now and predict what languages might be useful.
Im thinking Mandarin, Arabic, Russian and Spanish.
Would this be a good to-do list for languages?</p>
<p>Mandarin and Arabic, but they’re hard for an English speaker to pick up.</p>
<p>Important around the world, or for the military? Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi and Korean will all be important. It is hard to say whether Russian will be as important in 10 years as it was 30 years ago.</p>
<p>Spanish is good here, but outside of the Americas it isn’t as important of a language.</p>
<p>Government, not necessarily military. CIA, government security, foreign policy… I haven’t narrowed down my focus of study yet but I don’t want to waste time not learning some sort of language considering some will take years to fully master. </p>
<p>I have taken 3 years of Spanish, but that was 3 years ago. </p>
<p>Im trying to figure out what the world powers will be, who will be effecting foreign policy. Then those are the languages I want to master.</p>
<p>Tough to predict but you can certainly follow long term trends.</p>
<p>It would be much easier to learn a language if you actually have ANY interest in the culture because you will be doing cultural activities to improve your language, including watching films and reading literature, and it’s important that you actually enjoy them.</p>
<p>Pick the culture you have the most passion about and go from there. Don’t stress yourself with a to-do list.</p>
<p>Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, and Hindi are all languages that will both look relatively impressive and be useful. But the real question you should ask yourself is what you want to get out of learning the language and/or WHY in general you want to learn a language? If you’re just learning it for a vague notion of “helpfulness” or “impressiveness” you likely won’t be that motivated to study it and will not become fluent.</p>
<p>Learn something that is germane to an area of the world you’re interested in and that you’d like to study. It’s no secret that things like Arabic, Chinese, and Korean are a big deal right now, but the market’s flooded with people who took a few semesters in college of those languages. As a result I don’t think anything stands out prominently on a resume besides some like Pashto or Dari that are pretty much unheard of unless you’re a heritage speaker (and unlike some of the other critical languages like the ones I mentioned above there’s not a glut of them here in the US).</p>