# Best language for an American student to learn? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 8, 2015, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548 "2015-07-08T04:34:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/1 "2015-07-08T04:34:40Z")
Besides Spanish, which should be a common second language for Americans now, what other language should Americans learn? In older times it was French and German. I’m going to say Chinese now. What do you all think? ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/2 "2015-07-08T04:43:40Z")
Depends on what they’re going to do with it. ---
**Author:** ![Onomatopoeia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/onomatopoeia/32/4145_2.png) [@Onomatopoeia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Onomatopoeia)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/3 "2015-07-08T04:46:03Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Besides Spanish, which should be a common second language for Americans now, what other language should Americans learn? > > In older times it was French and German. > > I’m going to say Chinese now. What do you all think? I would tend to agree that it is a Chinese language, probably Mandarin. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/4 "2015-07-08T05:11:12Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Depends on what they’re going to do with it. Be able to interact with their international neighbors or possibly work in international business areas. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/5 "2015-07-08T05:13:46Z")
If you want to use it for travel, French would be far more useful (and I think easier to learn) than Chinese. French is spoken much more widely as a second language, including about half of Africa. [French is an official language in 29 countries, Chinese in just three.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language) I would think the main reason to learn Chinese would be if you were planning to do business with Chinese firms. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/6 "2015-07-08T05:19:46Z")
What languages do the neighbours speak? On a country scale, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Quechua, Inuktitut, Kreyol… Or what do actual neighbours speak? Or potential SOs? (I met a Chinese girl and suddenly Chinese became important…) Or are there family ties and family members or family records to follow? Or business? So, yeah, what **Thudlow Boink** said. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/7 "2015-07-08T06:23:31Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > If you want to use it for travel, French would be far more useful (and I think easier to learn) than Chinese. French is spoken much more widely as a second language, including about half of Africa. [French is an official language in 29 countries, Chinese in just three.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language) > > I would think the main reason to learn Chinese would be if you were planning to do business with Chinese firms. Take it from the French guy learning (Mandarin) Chinese : Chinese grammar is a whole, \*\*whole \*\*lot easier to tackle than French’s (or English, for that matter). As is the spelling, although obviously learning a few thousand ideograms by rote is the big hurdle there… but less so than dealing with all the devious traps and the million little rules (with three million exceptions, natch) of French IMO. The usefulness angle OTOH I’d more or less agree with you, although my Chinese teacher has a working theory that you can get by just about anywhere in the world with Mandarin and a handful of dialects, simply by looking for the local Chinese diaspora/the nearest Chinese-owned restaurant :p. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/8 "2015-07-08T07:37:24Z")
In my experience with dealing with Chinese on business transactions, Chinese and its dialects are not necessary. I got along fine in English. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 10:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/9 "2015-07-08T10:12:32Z")
I think though I have a better chance of working with a Chinese national than a French one. Particularly on the west coast. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/10 "2015-07-08T10:14:47Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > The usefulness angle OTOH I’d more or less agree with you, although my Chinese teacher has a working theory that you can get by just about anywhere in the world with Mandarin and a handful of dialects, simply by looking for the local Chinese diaspora/the nearest Chinese-owned restaurant :p. Almost every town in the US has a Chinese restaurant. Granted it might be run by Koreans or Vietnamese. “Chinese” is more of a generic term for Asian style food. ---
**Author:** ![PSXer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/48db29/32.png) [@PSXer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PSXer)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/11 "2015-07-08T10:18:22Z")
Latin all educated gentlemen should learn the Classics ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/12 "2015-07-08T12:48:02Z")
As a Francophone and a Mandarin speaker, French has been more useful to me by a mile. Mandarin is extremely useful-- if you live in China and need to order food and tell your taxi where to go. Otherwise, China has more English speakers than the U.S., and in the off chance that whatever business you are working with doesn’t have a decent English speaker, translators are pennies on the dollar. Investing the years of time and effort it takes to get to any kind of working proficiency in Mandarin is unlikely to pay off unless you have some really targeted plan for using it. Even living in China, it can be difficult to practice your Mandarin because everyone is so eager to practice their English. French, on the other hand, goes on the top of my resume and gets me jobs and job interviews all the time. I happen to work in an industry that works a lot with Africa, but I think what is really critical is that people do business in French often speak it as a second language. And that means they aren’t learning English as a second language. And that means that anyone who wants to work with them really does have to speak French. Add to that that French is relatively easy for English speakers and that most people can get to professional levels pretty quickly, and it’s a good bet. ---
**Author:** ![JerrySTL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e274bd/32.png) [@JerrySTL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JerrySTL)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/13 "2015-07-08T12:53:05Z")
In the early 70s I studied high school Latin. Then I moved to New Mexico where a lot of people speak Spanish. So Latin was a bad choice. A really bad choice. Besides Spanish, I’d think that one of the major Asian languages would be good to know. ---
**Author:** ![Merneith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/57b2e6/32.png) [@Merneith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Merneith)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/14 "2015-07-08T13:03:14Z")
I took Latin in high school & college. I can read French & Spanish, even though I’ve never studied those languages, thanks to what I learned in Latin class about grammar and vocabulary. (Although I can’t read Italian, because it’s in some kind of mental uncanny valley, for me). Language classes teach a student, one language. Latin class teaches students about Languages and how they work. I need to stop screwing around and study Greek. ---
**Author:** ![stpauler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9d8465/32.png) [@stpauler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stpauler)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/15 "2015-07-08T13:12:58Z")
First, English is definitely the \*lingua franca \*, it’s a wonderful language for an American student to learn. I wish more had learned it properly too. Second, I would state that Spanish, more specifically Castilian, is the next language to learn. Based on the number of Spanish-speaking Americans and the proximity to Mexico. It’s even the co-official language of one of the US States. Third, Mandarin. Not just for the fact that China could be a world power (remember the 80s when learning Japanese was a symbol of success as Japan was going to be HUGE?), but also because it’s a tonal language with specialized writing and a very different sentence structure. In high school and college I was an enormous polyglot. I loved learning languages. I took every single class I could. My senior year of high school was Japanese, French, English, Spanish, German, and then a social studies class. In college, I majored in German, minored in French, and took a beginning Swedish in German class. Over the years since I’ve always attempted to learn the languages of countries I have visited. Turkish, Italian, Hindi, Mandarin, Estonian, Dutch, Catalan, Polish, and even some useless Maltese. To my grandmother, it was important to be polite and that included speaking the language. Unfortunately, years of disuse and the languages fade from memory.I can still be pretty fluent in French and Spanish, German is a bit choppy for me and Japanese a bit of a memory. All of the little one-offs for the countries I visited are mostly gone. So that circles back to what languages a student should learn. Well, it needs to also be one that they will be able to use on at least a semi-regular basis. ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/16 "2015-07-08T13:14:27Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > In my experience with dealing with Chinese on business transactions, Chinese and its dialects are not necessary. I got along fine in English. The language of international business is English. When a Brazilian company engages in negotiations with an Italian company, the negotiations and all of the documents are prepared in English. English is the most common language. Almost everyone else in the world learns English first as a second language. ---
**Author:** ![GrumpyBunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bc8723/32.png) [@GrumpyBunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GrumpyBunny)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/17 "2015-07-08T13:22:47Z")
If you work in IT, I suppose that Hindi could be useful, except most of the Indians I work with use better grammar than Americans. ---
**Author:** ![Dorjan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorjan/32/12440_2.png) [@Dorjan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorjan)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/18 "2015-07-08T14:24:29Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > The usefulness angle OTOH I’d more or less agree with you, although my Chinese teacher has a working theory that you can get by just about anywhere in the world with Mandarin and a handful of dialects, simply by looking for the local Chinese diaspora/the nearest Chinese-owned restaurant :p. If you are going to go with that Chinese restaurant world travel plan, Cantonese would be the language to learn. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/19 "2015-07-08T14:40:08Z")
> [@GrumpyBunny](#): > > If you work in IT, I suppose that Hindi could be useful, except most of the Indians I work with use better grammar than Americans. And quite possibly don’t speak Hindi. There are something close to 300 languages in India, and Indians use English to speak to each other. My husband was the American on a team of Indian H1B developers - none of them could speak to each other in anything but English. ---
**Author:** ![tapu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/49beb7/32.png) [@tapu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tapu)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2015, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548/20 "2015-07-08T16:35:43Z")
Linguist here–studied 17 languages, fluent in none of them. But I can tell you that an American student who wants to thrive in the U.S. and then in other countries, should speak English, then study Spanish and French, and then study Arabic and/or Mandarin. I base this on continuing ties with various US populations, and with international populations as varied as you can imagine. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-language-for-an-american-student-to-learn/724548.md?page=2)