Learn a Foreign Language As an Engineer? 1021
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?
Absolutely. (Score:5, Informative)
Let me guess... (Score:1, Informative)
Nerdu.
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]
Japanese (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chinese (Score:2, Informative)
As if any Chinese person would actually eat that Americanized crap!
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.
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.).
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:3, Informative)
and despite the general uselessness of French elsewhere in the world (besides France)
Many Africans speak French, due to past French occupation of their countries. As a non-native French speaker, I actually find Africans much easier to understand than any French or Canadian speakers; Africans speak much more slowly.
These countries are not well-represented in IT or the sciences, however.
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:3, Informative)
Nevertheless I agree that French among others is still easier to learn because the grammar is more consistent and there are less exceptions. It's also easier because the word itself reveals its gender and there are only two to keep in mind...
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.)
What for? (Score:2, Informative)
For market reach: Spanish (opens up most of LatAm) and you can extend that to include (Brazilian) Portuguese without too much trouble, Chinese (obvious), Arabic (opens up a huge swath of the Middle East), Swedish (opens up much of the Nordics)
For fun: Italian (absolutely beautiful to hear spoken well and makes non-Italian women swoon), Esperanto (is relatively easy and will make you understandable to just about all Roman and Germanic language speakers), Dutch (if you want to exercise muscles in your throat you never knew you had), Slovenian/Czech (lots of interesting pain in East European culture but you need the language to appreciate it), Japanese (to be amazed about and get rid of your own preconceptions)
For mind expansion: Koshian languages (mentioned elsewhere), Latin and ancient Greek, Romansh, Swahili, Gaelic, Japanese, Indonesian
Forget about French and German unless you have specific reasons to learn those.
So take your pick, but do it as soon as possible: learning a new language is going to be really, really hard once you're past 30, unless you have a knack for it.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Suggestions... (Score:2, Informative)
> Learn Swiss..........Swedish hot chicks
They actually do speak Swedish in Sweden and (swiss German|English|Italien|French) in Swiss - both countries are about 1000 km distant from each other.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The language of engineers (Score:2, Informative)
They want to speak your language as much as you want to speak theirs, its give and take.
Speaking each others non native language to each other (with feedback) is a good way to go about it.
Germany is somewhat different.. they are more insular, but a lot of euro countries play english tv shows undubbed (with subtitles.. depending on where you are, the netherlands tends not to).
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.
Re:Japanese works great for career purposes, too (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, but Japan is #4, after Canada, China and Mexico. http://dataweb.usitc.gov/scripts/cy_m3_run.asp [usitc.gov]
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.nosig
Re:Where are you planning on working? (Score:3, Informative)
Spanish, within the U.S., is spoken by at least ten percent of the population [wikipedia.org] (around 32 million domestically, plus Spanish is spoken by approximately 330 million worldwide [ignatius.edu]), so that's a good starting place.
As it's a Romance Language, Spanish is an excellent gateway to Italian (around 60 million world-wide), Portuguese (together with Brazilian Portuguese, around 170 million) [ignatius.edu], and French (80 million) [ignatius.edu], not to mention all the second cousins (Catalan [wikipedia.org], Romansh [wikipedia.org], etc.)
Since the OP appears to read/write English, there's also German, Dutch and a host of tangentially related languages (Swedish is semi-related, I think, going by the swedish subs sometimes included in DVDs and the like, might not be so difficult to learn. Plus, think of the dating opportunities while visiting...)
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.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Suggestions... (Score:2, Informative)
Especially when your tank is 65 litres instead of 18 gallons.
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the reason that Koreans make such rapid progress in Japanese is that syntax is so familiar to them. Both languages are head-final (verb final in the clause, use postpositions rather than prepositions), form subordinate clauses in the same ways, have very similar topic-comment structures, etc. Both use similar systems of case-marking. A great deal of the stuff that seems weird if you are coming from English is the same in Japanese and Korean. But until those Koreans study Japanese, they can't understand much of anything because the vocabulary is almost completely different, unlike Spanish and Italian, where most of the vocabulary is recognizable.
I actually began Korean this way. A friend who also knew Japanese well and wanted to learn Korean persuaded the Korean instructor, who had grown up in Japan and so was a native bilingual, to offer a special intensive class that was essentially "Korean for Japanese speakers". She assumed that we already knew the syntax and Chinese characters. We learned hangul, spent a little time on pronunciation (the course was fairly heavily oriented toward reading Korean), learned the case-marking and the basics of conjugating verbs, and started reading. For us, most of the work was learning vocabulary. When a question came up, she usually answered by translating into Japanese.
Re:If you're going to live in the US ... (Score:1, Informative)
Just a little note: English is just a Romance as German. I'd say that German is less alien to English than all the other languages you have mentioned. We have lots of words in common and we even have an accent which incorporates parts of the English language (which is called "platt").
Nevertheless I agree that French among others is still easier to learn because the grammar is more consistent and there are less exceptions. It's also easier because the word itself reveals its gender and there are only two to keep in mind...
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.
English and German (along with Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, etc) are Germanic languages. The Romance laguages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc) are Romance languages. Both are Indo-European, but they are separate families.
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90017 [ethnologue.com]
Re:Suggestions... (Score:3, Informative)
"Swiss" is not a country. But "Switzerland" is.