To repeat what a lot of people have said: Chinese is HARD. Cultural understanding and immersion are fairly (on the VERY side of fairly) important, and if you can’t dig that part, don’t dig any of it. Spanish would be most usefull if you plan to live in Cali or Texas, while French would work better in Michigan and Minnesota. If you plan to live abroad, learning Latin (or really any romance language, emphasis on Latin and French) and German or Russian will probably get you farthest. However, none of these are remotely similar to American English. American English is composed of everything God decided might be fitting to pour out of a human mouth, in every form He imagined, and nowhere near the original intent of the words. In short, we fucked with every word we came across, and not in the pleasurable way. The closest you’ll ever get to the English you know is American Sign Language, which still has considerable grammatical difference, and a huge cultural aspect. So the real question is, which culture are you most interested in, because that in large part will help determine where you live and travel. You’re not going to go to Rome if you don’t plan to do as the Romans do. If you’re not interested in their culture, you won’t want to live there. Therefor, your cultural preference will help determine its usefulness.
Also… knowing what you’re DOING is VERY important. I plan to teach; therefor, Spanish and ASL are most useful (accessibility to foreign students and deaf/HOH students). As a mathematician, Russian ranks highest with French close behind. That’s part of why I studied French lightly and am currently taking ASL.
IMHO, ASL is your best choice. Since you’re looking to just knock out college credits, it’s as close to English as you will get, and being of a totally different mindset (being manual and not oral), it’s easier to differentiate and parse. And it’s a fair bit simpler, a large portion of connotations coming from facial and body expressions you already use. And since you’re just looking to knock out college credit (me being a student myself) Chinese is your worst choice. DO NOT learn Chinese unless you plan to LEARN Chinese, which was best expressed by koeeoaddi as “head pounding, up past 3 a.m., eye bleeding, oath swearing, existence questioning kind of hard.” Combining two KINDS of languages is good - mixing two of Romance, Slavic, Germanic, and Oriental - because switch between languages in the same group is far simpler than crossing groups. (And don’t flame me b/c English is technically Germanic; as previously expressed: it’s everything and thus utterly useless). And if none of these appeal to you, Jovan was absolutely correct in suggesting Klingon. While I’ve personally never had a chick say “That is so cool!” after finding out it’s Klingon, it sounds really impressive and is as utterly useless as any of these languages will probably end up being.
It sounds difficult, I don’t know about impressive. Not to society at large, I would guess.
Well, CG, I think Cantonese is a lot harder than Mandarin, and I seem to be better at it than most, for whatever that’s worth. There’s a lot more to it than “just” more tones.
I have taken note that I should have an interest in the culture, but I have interests in lots and lots of cultures. Chinese history and culture is infinitely more interesting than American history or even most of the European histories. Spanish is spoken in nearly 30 different countries, each with its own past. That in itself is astounding. 1.2 billion people speak Chinese. German and French are steeped(?) in cultures I could easily live in. It’s not that I don’t have an interest in any; it’s that I want to do too much.
As far as the classes go, I pretty much have to master whichever I choose. I’m going to a college in MN and have to master at least one language. Spanish is a minimum of four different terms advancing at least into the 200s. Chinese would involve at least 5 classes. Hmm…
Huh? You have to “master” a language? I find that hard to believe, or at least the wording. Is it just that you have to take it for a couple years or so for a BA? Because that won’t even get you started on mastery of Chinese; it’ll barely get you started. In two years of normal course-loads I’d say only a handful of the best students would be able to use Chinese for much of anything outside of class. That’s what you’d be up against. Are YOU prepared to take the Chinese Challenge??!?!!
I’ve spent a good amount of time in Brazil, and I haven’t really noticed it to be true. You are far more likely to find people with a knowledge of Enlgish rather than French. Listening to the radio, you can hear some English language pop songs, but you rarely if ever hear a French one.
Are you sure about this? I know that Brazil has a rather large population of Japanese descent, but I don’t think that there is an equilavently sized Chinese community.
I would warn anyone not to think any of the various travel Arabic tapes give you a particularly strong idea about the Arabic language, or even any of the dialects.
I would differ with Jovan in regards to Arabic.
There are some easy aspects, e.g. the lack of tones seems to me an advantage vis-a-vis Asian tonal languages, and the writing system really is not all that challenging. No ideograms to memorize, although I confess the non-voweling is a pain in the neck that requires some real grasp of context around the word when reading.
The dialectal situation is also a pain, alhtough there are regional units that make it somewhat easier. On the other hand some aspects of dialect are grammatically easier, e.g. North African tends to dispose of masc. and fem. conjugations for a single neuter conjugation.
But I guess I shall not differ from the judgment Arabic can be mind numbingly hard. [sub]And pox on Japanese Arabic primers, I own Arabic-Arabic primers[/sub]
Finally, in your 4 years in college, regardless of the langauge, you are simply laying a basis for future work. Being college exam proficient is rarely anything more than a statement that you’ve got a base to procede into the real world with.
Explore a bit and do not worry about discarding something that seems right at first but doesn’t stick.
(As an aside I find the assertion above that English is “everything” and therefor useless to be bizarre and ignorant.)
If you plan on staying in the US, then Spanish is probably the one you’ll most likely use- especially if you live in the southern half of the country.
As for Chinese, I have a number of cheap “tourist” language CD’s I found in a bargain bin: Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. The CD’s go through sections where they show you lists and then tests you on them. I found Chinese and Japanese much more difficult to remember than any of the others by far, because in those two languages there’s nothing in the written form to give any hint of what an ideogram represents, or how it is spoken. This makes it much more difficult to remember than languages that use alphabetic writing systems.
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Ahhh but the thing is that if GrimGrin opts for Chinese and finds he really likes it, enough to dedicate a few hundred hours of study, then, most likely he will go to China.
If I think about the people I knew when I was taking Japanese at the East-Asian Studies dpt., I can’t think of anyone who became fluent in either Japanese or Chinese without having spent at the very least a year abroad. And those who never became fluent probably forgot most of it.
Studying a language seriously, in an academic context, very often creates opportunity. Look at my location field for a good example.
Not exactly true. Depends on the character, there are various sorts of hints built-in to it. In fact, these “hints” are very similar to roots, prefixes, and suffixes in English.
Now, a beginning pupil usually doesn’t start by remembering roots, etc. He starts by rote memorisation of various words. Same with Chinese.