Slashdot Log In
Learn a Foreign Language As an Engineer?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 07, 2008 05:12 PM
from the math-is-the-universal-language dept.
from the math-is-the-universal-language dept.
Ben B writes "I'm working on an undergraduate degree in computer engineering in the US, and I'm a native English-speaking citizen. In fact, English is the only language that I know. Maybe it's not the same at other schools, but for the engineering program at mine, a foreign language is not required. If my plans are to one day be involved in research, is it worth my time to learn a foreign language? If so, which one?" Learning something new is almost never a waste of time, but how much energy have others found worthwhile to expend with all of the programming/math/tech type courses to be had at a large university?
Related Stories
Submission: Learn a Foreign Language as an Engineer? by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Suggestions... (Score:5, Funny)
Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Klingon.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Funny)
At least that way, gas prices won't seem so bad when they're priced in litres instead of gallons.
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Funny)
Learn Norwegian......Norwegian hot chicks
Learn Portugese......Brazillian hot chicks
Learn Swiss..........Swedish hot chicks
Learn Japanese.......Cosplay...errr Japanese hot chicks
Learn Khoisan........because noone else will (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan_languages)
Layne
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
Swedish and Norwegian are very similar languages. You can learn the other pretty easily if you speak one (or some my Swedish-ex used to say).
There is no "Swiss" language, they speak German, Italian, and French.
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Funny)
Gesundheit!
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Learn Swiss..........Swedish hot chicks
Layne
I would think Swedish chicks would speak Swedish and Swiss chicks would speak German, French, Italian,or Romansh...
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Funny)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/507 [mozilla.org]
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a foreigner, you'll be surprised on how many foreigners you'll meet. Since every exchange student is more or less on it's own, they're all trying to make the best of it. AND PARTY :D Meeting local people might be more difficult, just because they're not mixing with the foreigners as much, and he'll have to do an effort to learn the language of the country you're going to. But the experience will be worth a lot, not just on the resume.
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
In any case, most Swedes speak almost perfect English, as do most Norwegians, Finns, and Danes.
Apparently, the main reason is that all the English-language movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Furthermore, they're very small countries, and they use it as a lingua franca (if you'll pardon the irony) amongst themselves.
That said, learning a language is a great intellectual exercise; I've just started learning German, and have enjoyed it a lot.
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
The structural and pronunciation differences are enough to be functionally incompatible, unless you are almost fluent.
It never ceases to amaze me why people think that the Portuguese situation is somehow "different" from the myriads of different English, French and Spanish variations. The structural differences are actually almost non existing (assuming we are talking about the regular, cultured versions of the languages, since I somehow get the impression that many people think that everyone in Brazil speaks the language as spoken in the favelas by the unfortunately barely literate low-class inhabitants) and the pronunciation differences vary greatly within Brazil itself (and Portugal: people from S. Miguel Island speak Portuguese, and are often subtitled due to the deep regional accent).
The situation is such that often multilingual instructions booklets come with both variants.
The same happens for every other pluri-continental language: booklets are generally made to specific markets, and the representatives of each market send a translation. I have booklets with different sections for DE (DE), DE (CH) and DE (AT).
Anyway, this is moot: give me a online newspaper article from Brazil that reflects those differences, so great that they need to be duplicated. I never found any, but I'm open to be surprised, and I would be vrey surprised if you could come up with anything, from any literate source, that has anything more that slight spelling differences and some regional preferences in terms of construction and used vocabulary.
In Portugal it's very common for people to refer to Brazilian Portuguese as "Brazilian" instead (like a foreign language).
Exactly like the Brits use "American", more as a differentiator and sometimes as a "we-are-the-ones-that-speak-the-original-one" kind of remark, used to specify quickly that the pronunciation or spelling are from Brazil. You're however not considering the fact that most prime-time television in Portugal is actually spoken in the Brazilian variant (novelas), which would be kind of strange if it was considered a "foreign" language. You could argue that the reverse isn't true - which is true - which would actually mirror the experiences of every other European language: the "original" speakers tend to pick up the New World variations a lot better than the opposite, mainly due to the fact that they are a lot more "closed" in terms of used sounds.
Bear in mind that I have absolutely nothing against the whole of Brazil deciding what they should speak,how they should write and how to call the language. But the "oh, it's very different!" statement has no actual basis - at least for now - and in general portraits an erroneous picture of the actual situation to those who don't know the language.
Parent
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Where are you planning on working? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that if you are planning on working in the United States, your time would be better spent focusing on your Computer studies. Most foreign engineers here speak English.
IF, however, you were planning on going abroad, then speaking the local language would get you a lot of "street cred" that you would otherwise be lacking.
Re:Where are you planning on working? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that if you are planning on working in the United States, your time would be better spent focusing on your Computer studies. Most foreign engineers here speak English.
I disagree. Much like learning an impractical but interesting computer language, the time spent learning a foreign language has many benefits in terms of widening your perspective, giving you new ways to think about things, etc. beyond the simple ability to use it in the country or countries where it is spoken.
The time spent is pretty small in the end. And that time really doesn't come out of your computer studies. It's such a different activity that it's the kind of thing that can help recharge your brain from all that math and programming. The benefits are well worth it.
Parent
Re:Where are you planning on working? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that if you are planning on working in the United States, your time would be better spent focusing on your Computer studies. Most foreign engineers here speak English.
1) I strongly advise learning a foreign language just to make yourself a better person. My Mandarin is pretty good, and my Spanish is -- well, enough to get me in trouble when in Spanish-speaking environments.
2) While there are good reasons to learn foreign languages for business purposes, especially if you already have plans on joining the dark side and working for purchasing/marketing/logistics, etc., speaking from a CSci/Engineering point of view, English is the lingua franca of scientific work, and will probably remain so for some time. There are two up-and-coming economies, India and China. University-educated Indians speak English. Chinese for some structural reasons is not likely to become a replacement for English soon. I will explain.
One of the strengths of English is it's effortless ability to absorb foreign words when it becomes necessary to do so. Thus we have acquired cryptography (Greek Kryptos), carnivore (Latin carne and vorare), and otaku (Japanese Otaku), etc. etc.
Chinese cannot do that and maintain the "structural integrity" of the language. Chinese is written in characters. Characters generally apply to meaning. There is no katakana alphabet like Japanese to phonetically express words of foreign origin. While there are exceptions; "coffee" becomes ka fei and "Coca Cola" becomes ke ko ke le ("Happiness in the mouth". No kidding. The "bite the wax tadpole" of urban legend would be a completely different set of characters, and is seldom if ever used). More frequently, things and concepts become Sinicised. "Hard drive" becomes ying die (hard platter), "Printer" becomes yin biao ji (imprint display machine), and "postmodernism" becomes hou xian dai zhu yi (after modern period principle/ideology), etc. etc.
The end result of this is that most hardware engineering in China is done in English. There is generally no parallel chipset documentation put out by UMC or Taiwan Semiconductor documenting the timing and logic in Mandarin, as it would serve no purpose but to drive everyone insane.
If you DO learn to speak Chinese, you will get 50,000 cool points with your Chinese-speaking colleagues. Whether it will ever add a dollar to your bank account I can't say. It hasn't done anything for mine.
Parent
If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're going to stay in the US, you might as well increase your value by learning spanish.
If you're looking at the EU, learn spanish, italian, german, french, or russian.
If you're looking in asia, mandarin.
If you're looking at india, hindi (or PROPER english).
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hindi? I'm not sure about that...most Indians in the tech industry are south Indians. In other words, they speak Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil. Not Hindi.
No, really. Look at all of the cities that are described as "the Silicon Valley of the East". They are Bangalore (Kannada-speaking), Hyderabad (Telugu-speaking), and Chennai (Tamil-speaking).
If you're going into engineering and want to move to India, look to the south.
Parent
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Italian is only spoken in Italy and a tiny part of Switzerland. Spanish only in Spain, and Spain is more of a Second World country. Neither will get you very far anywhere outside of those respective countries. It's not like the in the Americas -- people don't speak Spanish much in the EU -- other than tourist Spanish anyway... There are more Poles than Spaniards, you'd be better off learning that than Spanish.
French is widely spoken. German is widely spoken (in fact, it has the highest number of native speakers of all languages in Europe)(though not always welcome). Russian is rarely spoken outside of Kaliningrad and Karlovy Vary, but is widely understood (though rarely very welcome.)
Parent
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:5, Informative)
* Spain is the 8th nominally-ranked GDP country in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) [wikipedia.org]
* Spain is ranked 10th in the Economist's quality-of-life index ranking (before the US, Japan, Germany, and the UK)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index [wikipedia.org]
* Spain is on the high income list by the World Bank and on the IMF's advanced economy list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World [wikipedia.org]
But what else can I say? you are way smarter than me... right?
Parent
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:5, Funny)
There are 1 types of people in this world. Those who waste bits.
Those who don't are considered to be the default case.
Layne
Parent
stick to english (Score:5, Insightful)
There are publications in basically every language in CS/CE. If you really want to learn one, pick from Japanese, German, French, Russian, Chinese.
But it won't do you much good, and in reality, you'll never have time to read foreign journals (or looked at another way, it would be a comparative waste of your time given the quantity of good material you could be reading in English).
Re:stick to english (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Absolutely. (Score:5, Informative)
It depends... (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't let it distract you from your main coursework though, that is most important. Foreign language study should be in line with business courses. Not necessary for starting out, but helpful in moving up.
Find something (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was getting my BS in Computer Science (class of 08!), I took 3 semesters of Spanish and 1 Chinese. Taking foreign languages forces you to think in new ways, which is what problem solving is all about. Also, Spanish and Chinese are both fairly similar to English, but Spanish was fun for me while Chinese was just a pain in the ass since very few of the words are cognates.
If it's just for career purposes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mandarin Chinese.
If you actually want to enjoy, pick something that you actually have an interest in. Ton of anime junkies have picked up Japanese for example. If you like Bollywood, learn Hindi. And so on...
Japanese works great for career purposes, too (Score:5, Informative)
1) Japan is the world's second largest economy (going to be 3rd eventually after China gets big) ... almost NO Americans speak business level Japanese ... this gets in the way of multi-million dollar deals every day of the week
2) Japan is America's #2 trading partner, probably #1 in software (no time to look it up)
3) Most Japanese people don't speak business-level English (engineers are worse than almost any college-educated profession at this)
4)
5)
Bonus points: its so much harder to learn Japanese (and Japanese business culture & etc) than it is to learn Java that you become essentially outsourcing-proof. Trust me: my Japanese employer is trying like crazy to find Indians who speak Japanese and can program, and its needle in a haystack even when multiplied by a population of a billion. So we get English speaking Indians instead. Somebody needs to be able to talk with the Indians on a level deeper than "Hello, nice to meet you. This is a pen", so I get promoted. (Our other bilinguals are the CEO and two department heads, and their time is too valuable to use doing low-level management on one programming team.)
Parent
Qu'vatlh ghuy'cha' jay'! (Score:5, Funny)
Hab SoSlI' Quch!
Questioned Answered (Score:5, Funny)
is it worth my time to learn a foreign language? If so, which one?
Girlspeak.
I'm currently living with four (4) girls (three daughters, wife) all of which are able to speak in riddles and conundrums that they themselves understand, while leaving me completely at a loss of any valuable information.
Interestingly enough, this Girlspeak language transcends cultural boundaries! It is simply amazing how two girls can communicate without actually knowing the native tongue of the other.
The fact is, I've spent half a lifetime trying to understand girlspeak without much progress.
Re:Questioned Answered (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
How else are you going to meet girls (Score:4, Interesting)
When the time comes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Concentrate on what you need to concentrate on, and expand your horizons when it becomes necessary. This will provide the most efficient use of time in almost all cases - provided you don't become so focussed on whatever you're into that you genuinely don't notice when a new skill is required. (That's the only real risk of getting in too deep).
Despite this view on life, I've always had a great admiration for those who enjoy learning activities in their lesiure time. Personally I've always preferred video games.
Depends on what you want to do (Score:5, Informative)
English is the lingua franca, so from a business standpoint, if you want to be an engineer type dude, you are probably set.
Chinese would be smart if you want to make more money learning a foreign language, so is Arabic. Russian is damn hard, but that would greatly increase your marketability as well. Like if you want to be a consultant or something later on.
If you want to learn a language for the hell of it, I'd recommend a romance language. Pick one that seems interesting, French and Italian are very pretty sounding. IMHO, German is very cool from a logical standpoint, many words are simply conjugations of smaller words.
Here is a list of the 30 most spoken languages: http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html [krysstal.com]
First choice.... (Score:4, Funny)
Most definintely! (Score:4, Interesting)
Foreign languages are priceless in today's world of constant internationalization. I work with people form Germany, Russia, Japan, Norway and Brazil. I speak one foreign language and I wish I knew more. In fact, not knowing Spanish has bitten me in the rear because I could have advanced my career by moving to Latin America where I would fly up the corporate ladder. As somebody who got hired (at least once) for my foreign language and IT skills, I firmly believe that speaking a foreign language is a good career boost.
We have been in many situations were customers from Asia and other parts of the world love to pay extra big bugs for specialists who speak their langauge. It is not that they don't want to speak English, it is the fact that they prefer to deal with people who can speak English and their own language just in case. Technical people who know English + one of CJK or Spanish are becoming priceless because Latin American and Asia are booming. When our company was rapidly expanding, we could not hire enough engineers who were fluent in several languages. Those who got hired received more than generous packages and relocation opportunities. While this may not be appealing to a married person with a couple of kids, a young single college graduate will sure appreciate a six month gig in Japan paid for by an employer. This really helps if you end up working in a small (but well paid) field. You help your employer with building a new customer base in a remote part of the world and suddenly you go from a college graduate to a young professional who brought a company XYZ to a new country. As you can tell from my post, I am all about speaking as many languages as possible.
The bottom line is: Learn language if you would like to be qualified for more opportunities when it comes to travel and corporate mobility. If you believe that your current town/city/country is the best place in the world, then do not bother.
You have to live there (Score:4, Insightful)
You can go to as many classes as you like, but it's an entirely different thing to actually use a language.
Study Abroad (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't just learn the language, study abroad -- I took Japanese and spent a term at Kansai Gaidai. The experiences of a) being put into an entirely new environment and b) being forced to set aside engineering for a term, were both invaluable. It was a tremendous aid as well in terms of getting into grad school.
Learn Bocce (Score:4, Funny)
Don't waste your time learning Wookie -- they're not hiring right now. But if you can speak Bocce then you can get a job on any of the Hutt-controlled planets. What the galaxy really needs, however, is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators. I suggest taking some classes in Human-Cyborg Relations.
Chinese. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a computer scientist working for a major industrial research lab.
English is still the primary language for technology research publications, and will continue to be so for the near future. So don't worry about needing to read foreign journals. Yes some French or German or Japanese might help you find a few more obscure things, but generally if the work is worthwhile it eventually gets published in English.
However, personally I think you should learn Mandarin Chinese. Why?
1) There's a gigantic pool of IT research talent in China that we're only beginning to tap. They publish primarily in English, but their spoken English is generally poor with some exceptions. It's a tremendous benefit to know at least some Chinese in order to be able to socialize with your Chinese colleagues at a conference or when visiting. And I'm fairly certain that if you make a career in research in the next 50 years, you will be visiting and possibly living in the PRC at some point.
2) Research isn't for everyone. If you discover this at an awkward time in your career, it helps to have other skills to fall back on. Being able to speak Chinese is already a significant career asset, and this is likely to continue.
3) Spoken Chinese is a great language to learn, because it challenges a native-English-speaker's conceptions of grammar and meaning. It forced me to think about language in a whole new way, similar to how Prolog completely broke my brain as a sophomore CS undergrad.
All that said, Chinese fluency requires 8+ years of intensive education and immersion to develop; you will most likely never become as proficient in it as you might in a Western language.
As one who's studied a few languages, (Score:5, Interesting)
I would recommend holding off on learning languages at the University unless you are either interested in the language or intend to pursue a career in a place where that language is spoken.
My experiences with foreign languages:
If you know what you are going to college for, then work towards that goal. Don't take a foreign language just because you think you should. It will usually end up being a waste of time. You will appreciate a foreign language far more if you actually learn it while living in the country where it's spoken, and you will retain it far longer than learning a language only from a book. There are great career opportunities overseas for engineers...always have been, always will be, and I strongly recommend pursuing one, even if it's only for six months to a year. Then, while you're there, study up on the language. When you're there, then it's incredibly rewarding.
Either a Latin Language, or a "Weird" One (Score:5, Interesting)
I took both Japanese and French. Ramifications:
With Japanese, I understand i18n issues EXTREMELY well (word order, multi-byte charsets, the horrific beast that is iso-8022-jp, input methods, etc, etc).
With French, my understanding of English grammar and its idiosyncrasies was much improved. As an added plus, my wife thinks it's sexy :-).
Neither is probably an optimal second language for an English speaker, but they illustrate two goals that are different from the one you imply (i.e. to understand stuff written in a different language).
A language that has some similarities to your native tongue will grant you a much better understanding of your native tongue (plus it will be easier to learn because of cognates, etc).
A language that is radically different from your native language will open your mind to very different patterns of thought (without the flashbacks ;-) ). Particularly for i18n code (and everyone's writing i18n-friendly code, right?), this is a big deal.
I won't be reading any heavy tech papers in either language, but the experiences have been invaluable.
My suggestions: Spanish for the Latin language, maybe Mandarin or Japanese (still) for the "weird" one.
Re:Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
The language of engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The language of engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned German for three years, thinking it might be good for science. I even stayed with a German family for six weeks one summer. What I discovered: The Germans mostly speak better English than 3 years worth of German, and they're usually eager to practice it. Had I learned Spanish instead, at least I could converse with the gardeners around here. Don't get me wrong... I agree with all the things you said, but with the huge influx of Spanish speakers into the US, it's just more useful.
Parent
Re:The language of engineers (Score:5, Informative)
How about German?
[...]
It has a very logical structure. Learning German might actually help you with maths.
It does? I'm a native speaker of German, and I can't say it's very logical. Parts of it are, yes, but it's nowhere near mathematical. And it's a really tough language to learn as a second language because of all those things you have to know (the grammatical sex of every noun, the many irregular verbs, etc.).
Parent
Re:The language of engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
"I am 23 right now - too old to start learning an instrument again."
Crazy talk! Get an instrument and start playing.
Parent
Easy! (Score:5, Funny)
(if (vowel? (first wd))
(word wd 'ay)
(pigl (word (bf wd) (first wd)))))
(define (vowel? letter)
(member? letter '(a e i o u)))
Parent
Re:Easy! (Score:4, Funny)
Ewww.. I understood that. Icky icky
{icky; icky(); if ((_hIcky32 = GetIck32(hWnd, pIck))==SUCCESS) { //ICKY! }
Icky LISP!
Parent
Re:Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
This is part truth and part old wife's tale. Yes, there are some things in a language that are more difficult to learn once you're older.
But no, the reality is that with proper immersion most adults can learn a new foreign language in twelve weeks or less (and in some cases depending on the language itself, that includes a rudimentary level of reading and writing in that language as well). Now how many 2 year olds, 6 year olds, or 10 year olds, do you know that can do the same in twelve weeks or less?
The truth is that with proper immersion, most kids will learn a new foreign language over a year -- or over several years, it's just that we don't really count their time -- the same way we adults count our own time (after all, we have things to do as adults, and them -- the kids -- the kids seem like they're wasting their time watching things like Pokemon). And it's also partly based on the fact that for those of us who did learn a foreign language as a kid, we didn't really remember how we learned it -- so we just assume -- that in hindsight -- it must have been really easy and really fast.
Parent