I want to learn a language...which one should I pick?

To make a long story short, in about two and a half years I’ll be getting out of the Navy and I want to go in to some sort of international business. I’ve always been fascinated by foreign languages and I want to get a head start on learning one before I get out. I know the best way to learn is via immersion but that’s not really an option for me so for the mean time it will have to be some form of self study and practice. These are the options I’m looking at:

French - I took this in high school for four years so I know a little bit already

Chinese - I don’t know any but I do work with a bunch of people who speak it as a second language. Not native fluency but they do DLPT (government language test) at a 3/3 level.

Arabic - I don’t know any but I am friends with a native speaker of Iraqi Arabic and she is willing to help me

Japanese, Portuguese - Previously suggested to me as good options

Spanish - I already know a little but I’m not particularly interested in making this my second language

So which of these options is best? Or is there another language I should be thinking about? I’m willing to listen to all opinions. Thank you for your help!

I’m thinking Spanish, French, or Chinese, depending on where business takes you. “Business” could take you in many different directions, so is there anything else–family connections, personal likes or dislikes, technical fields–that would influence what direction your business would take you? If you’re doing something involving Islamic art, Arabic or Persian would be good directions, for example. Or Japanese and French if you’re into world comics (though Chinese and Korean are coming up fast there…).

Learning to speak Chinese isn’t that difficult once you get used to the tones. Learning to write it is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

I think Arabic would be very cool.

OP is looking for opinions. So be it. Moved from GQ to IMHO.

samclem Moderator

I don’t really have a plan for where business could take me…my end goal is to have a job that involves traveling to a foreign country and conducting business in the local language. I have a family member who works in corporate sales so I could potentially get a job with him (he suggested Chinese or Portuguese).

Also, I don’t know too much about the academic world…do any universities have a reputation for great language programs?

Seconded, plus, an advantage of Chinese is that people think it’s hard, and thus many people would be impressed if you speak it.

Frankly, I am suspicious of people who say “I want to learn a language, but not Spanish.” Spanish is, hands down, the easiest and most useful language for an American to learn. It is a language that can be used in a practic manner every day, and will be useful for any line of work. And unless you are a language genius, you absolutely will need that practical experience to get anywhere near knowing a language enough to get more use out of it than a tourist could pick up in a few weeks.

Given the massive benefits to Spanish, I can’t help but think people who dismiss it as their first second language are more in love with the idea of knowing a language than the reality of using it.

I speak Chinese, and it is one of my more useless skill. China has more English speakers than the US does. Translators work for pennies, and anyone younger than 40 in business speaks English. Unless you have a burning academic passion for it AND plan to work in China pretty much exclusively, it’s not really useful beyond making Chinese toasts as a party trick.

French is useful for working with Africa. Spanish for South America. I Arabic used to be useful when only a handful of security-clearence ready Americans spoke it, but now that rush is pretty much over. Specific Asian languages will be useful if you plan to live and work there. Everywhere else, the business class speaks better English than you do.

By all means learn a language, but if you want to get anything more out of it than knowing something “neat” but useless, plan very carefully. Interview people working the jobs you aim to work and ask them not only what they know, but how they learned and how they use it. Or, learn Spanish so you can talk to those guys down the street and at least use the skill you invested your time in. Language is a tool of communication, and except for academic linguists it rarely has much value unless you are using it.

If you choose Arabic, you will almost certainly end up studying MSA (Modern Standard Arabic). Be aware that no one actually SPEAKS this version of Arabic, although they do write it. Colloquial Arabic differs a lot, in both accent and vocabulary, from country to country. Most everyone can understand Egyptian colloquial Arabic, because Egypt has the Arabic equivalent of Bollywood, so Arabic-speaking people everywhere become accustomed to Egyptian vernacular due to the movies. But if you study Egyptian Arabic and go to Morocco, others may understand you; that does not mean you will understand them!

How big a problem this is depends on who you talk to. One of my friends is Moroccan; he could not understand, or be understood, for a few weeks in Egypt. He then managed to sort things out. However, he is a natural linguist. Although he did not start studying English until he was in high school, when he learned it in the classroom, he is virtually indistinguishable from a native speaker now, in both his verbal and written communications. So his ability to slide from one version of Arabic to another is not necessarily typical.

However, here is a website with some background that suggests the problem is not as insurmountable as it is made to seem.

Arabic is fascinating but requires a LOT of hard work. Not only is the written alphabet different, but there are other difficulties to contend with as well: vowels are usually left out, and letters are written differently depending on whether they appear as the first, middle, or last letter of a word. Finally, Arabic lettering is considered art, so even after you master the basics reading street signs can be difficult because of the playfulness with which many things are written (imagine that you struggle to read English, and everything you are trying to comprehend is written in Gothic font; it is something akin to that experience).

One language to add to your list of the ones under consideration is Bahasa Melayu/Indonesia (the national language of Malasia/Indonesia, commonly referred to as “Bahasa” although technically that is incorrect as the original meaning of “bahasa” is simply "language). It is relatively easy to learn, as it uses the same alphabet as English; spellings and pronunciation usually match up extremely well; and there are no tenses or cases to worry about (for example, the words “I, me, my, mine” are all one word).

Career-wise, Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world and the largest Moslem one, while Malaysia has experienced economic success disproportionate to its modest size. There are many business opportunities in Indonesia; the size of its domestic market has shielded it somewhat from the effects of global economic downturns.

Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia are extremely similar and completely mutually intelligible. The differences are perhaps slightly more extreme than between British and American English, but not much.

ETA: I just saw even sven’s post and I think she is too harsh. I always wanted to learn an “interesting” language and Spanish, given its relative similarity to English, never qualified in my book. There is nothing wrong with choosing a language because the linguistics interest you. As for me, I was bored by French, and yet I had so much fun learning Indonesian! It is an inflected language (I won’t define that term here but you can easily find out more by Googling), which means it operates under some fundamentally different rules quite unlike English as well as unlike most Romance languages (yes, I do know English is technically not a Romance language, but there are times when it sure seems like one). If you like “the idea” of language study, this is a huge motivation.

… NM, double post …

Both Spanish and Chinese! I’ve gotten the Spanish dominated (that’s a neat Spanish use that I’ve decided to use in English now). My Chinese sucks, but I’m going to start classes in a couple of weeks. I feel totally useless outside of work here, and I lost my driver for an hour yesterday.

So speaking of professions, both Spanish and Chinese (as an American) will take you everywhere. You already know the most important language – English – that will be needed in business. A large, truly international company will default to English because even thought it’s (for example) based in France, it will have so many suppliers and customers in different countries that English will be the lingua franca.

I love recounting my experience in one of my American company’s plants in Belgium with Swedish affiliates on site. It’s a mess of languages – German, Dutch, French, Swedish, English. The only guaranteed language was English.

The same really goes in Latin America and China as well. I don’t want to learn Chinese for work. I want to learn Chinese so that I can avoid toad and dog and shrimp at restaurants.

Even Sven already made some good points to consider. I don’t know what you mean by being “fascinated” with languages, because if you want to learn a language to the point where it’s useful in your career* then you need to invest an awful lot of time and effort there. Are you ready and willing to spend 1 hr. each day minimum, 30 min. of practicing speaking and 30 min. of learning vocabulary, for two years (if you are a fast learner)? Then you might become fluent enough to consider moving to another country.

You say immersion is not an option; I assume you mean you can’t move to a country where that language is spoken - though if you pick French, where you have a start, move to one of the French regions of Canada; if you pick Spanish, move to Mexico.

However, as has been said in language-learning threads before, in this age of internet, you don’t need to travel to another country. Having friends who speak that language and are willing to teach you (that is not automatically a given!, because it requires patience and effort to teach somebody) is very good, but even without them, use the following aids:

CD-ROM learning programs with a microphone lets you learn the correct pronunciation of words right from the start, and watching little video scenes of daily life makes the first steps easier
read webpages in the foreign language, starting with linked wikipedia articles (which are NOT translations, though!)
listen to web radio and watch web TV in the foreign language; that will also get you acquainted with the culture and politics of the other country
look for a tandem buddy who wants to learn english from you (your friend may have less incentive if they already speak english well enough) if you have a webcam: 30 min. you both speak foreign, the next 30 min. you both speak english
buy books and comics in the foreign language (public domain is also free, but may be oldfashioned language)

Think back of your four High School years of French: was learning the vocabulary and understanding the grammar easy or hard for you? Unless you are gifted with a good memory and an ear for accents, learning a language properly enough will be difficult, so I would recommend either French, since you already have a basis and since English is badly-spoken French anyway; or Spanish, which, as Romance language, is closely related to English.

While Arabic and Chinese are up and booming, they are also very far away from English and thus difficult to learn.

Both French and Spanish open up the former colonies so you have many countries available to you besides France and Spain (Canada and Mexico).

I would recommend to set your aim realistic, too: to get good enough that you will not need a translator or that you can work as translator yourself requires many years (4 years of full-time learning in a special school for translator for example) and hard work and is not well paid. Instead, I would aim for speaking the language well enough that you can move to a country speaking that language or interact with people from that country in the US.

Only one thing to add to some of the above excellent responses: Portuguese would be a waste of your time unless you know you will be spending a lot of time in Brazil, Portugal, or the one or two other remote places where it’s spoken. Despite being a romance language, it’s not that easy to learn, and has the added difficulty of having different pronunciations depending on which country you are visiting. I learned Brazilian Portuguese and was largely lost when they sent me to Lisbon for two years.

While it’s true that big international companies might have English as official language of communication, speaking a foreign language well enough to get along is still a huge advantage:

  • you are not dependent on big companies; you can instead move to another country and look for work there in mid-size and smaller companies, where the local language will be standard, not English

  • even in companies where the official language is English, but a lot of the employees are local, they will probably use the local language to chat among themselves. You will be left out of a lot of conversations, which not only hurts and isolates, but can contain important information.

  • because of this, a big company may consider a person speaking the foreign language above another employee who only speaks English when considering who to send abroad.

  • if you move to another country, you will not only spend your time working (in fact, many non-American countries have the attitude: you work to live and not: you live to work). Getting around the city, talking with the neighbours, going to an office for paperwork, going shopping … all that is much more easier if you speak local language than if you rely on people speaking English. And if the foreigners must speak English to you, expect misunderstandings because their English is not fluent. (If you speak a foreign language, expect misunderstandings, too, of course until you become fluent. Tandem courses before would help there).

I always chose languages to learn based on my own personal enjoyment. Latin, Hungarian, German, und so weiter…

German is actually an interesting one. When I did my minor in German at university, the prof gave us some pamphlets published by the German Embassy in Canada. A lot of the kids in our class were in the Bachelor of International Business, and so it was on “What studying German can do for you.” The embassy made its argument that given the strength of the economies of Germany and Switzerland, German was a second lingua Franca in Europe. At least in my trips to Eastern Europe, I can vouch that German was more valuable to me than English. Eurocentric, sure, but I don’t know if it’s anymore esoteric than learning a given Chinese dialect, or Japanese.

I’m not saying “Go learn German!” But I had a good time doing it, and the vocab is similar enough, even if the grammar is crazy. Food for thought.

About 10% of the population are natural language people who can pick up languages with ease. They should go back to studying Sanskrit or Welsh and ignore this advice. This advice is fothe rest of us- people like me who may love learning languages, but have no special knack for it.

The thing is that one hour of book learning is worth about ten minutes with a native speaker- and that ten minutes can be spent over beer.

Ten weeks of immersion is about all it takes to get most people functional and independent for everyday living- it’d take most people a year or more of book learning to get olto that point. If your goal is "I want to perform everyday tasks in a non-English speaking country, book learning can get you there, but in one of the least eficient ways possible. You are going to retread your first three months of work before you get out of the airport. It makes more sense just to wait till you are there.

Learning a language to beef up a resume is a different story, but the work is almost certainly not worth it unless you have a concrete plan. Aid workers focusing on Africa need French and maybe Arabic. They do not, as I an learning, need Chinese. Anyway, if you need a language for career advancement, you will already know what language you need. It’s not some big mystery I need French. My collegues speak it. The jobs I appky to require it. Stuff I need to read is in it. When a language will help a career, that is what it looks like.

This isn’y to discourage you- it’s the opposite. Too many people waste a few weeks poreing over “Introduction to Japanese” before deciding its too much work and moving on, never to try again. I mean to say even a language dumbass like me can be working on her fifth language (Setswana!) and speaking all kinds of crazy shit fairly fluently- but it takes good planning and smart choices. Why waste your time brute forcing a language when, with a little thought, you can pick one up like second nature? Pick something you have an immediate need or at least opportunity to speak, and that’s what will happen.

My opinion for a second employment-related language would be Spanish for domestic employment and Chinese for international employment. Spanish because a growing number of Americans speak it so it represents an expanding market. Chinese because China’s economy continues to expand into the global economy.

Yeah, I hope no one was thinking that I was recommending not learning anything; quite the contrary. Germany would have sucked if I’d not spoken any German (that was 20 years ago, though. Now when I go to German, no one lets me speak German!). Mexico is awesome if you can speak Spanish fairly well. I’m sure China will be, too.

No votes for Klingon?

Bah! Those filthy P’taks don’t have two slips of latinum to rub together; no reason to learn it!

Concordia College in Moorhead, MN is where I went for language (actually did a now defunct program at their language camps and completed my major in a year in German).

As for which one to pick on a business level, Spanish would still be the best one if you are living in the US.