The Top Languages

  • Thread starter Thread starter BayConRong
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BayConRong

BayConRong

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BayConRong
I've decided that for my future career I would like to be a Linguist, because of how much I like to talk.

I know English as a first language, I've taken 2 years of French, though i'm a little shaky, and i know enough vietnamese to get myself into trouble. i'm considering taking either Dutch, German, Portuguese, or Mandarin Chinese.

I would like to learn a language that i could actually use outside of a classroom so which language do you guy's think I should learn next?

I refuse to take Spanish because i already look Mexican and if i could speak it I might get beat up by some "White Kids".

I already have a very good accent when I speak Chinese.

Also what do you guy's actually think the next top trading language will be?
 
If you're going into the business world, learn Chinese. Then German.
 
Omnis
If you're going into the business world, learn Chinese. Then German.
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I agree. China and India are up and comers in the business world. Since you already know some French, the other romantic languages shouldn't be too hard to pick up. I'm not sure where you're located but Spanish is probably going to end up being the second language of the U.S. so it wouldn't hurt to learn some.

On a personal level, I think people who learn Latin, the 'dead language', are morons. Its a dead language for a reason.
 
Loon
I agree. China and India are up and comers in the business world. Since you already know some French, the other romantic languages shouldn't be too hard to pick up. I'm not sure where you're located but Spanish is probably going to end up being the second language of the U.S. so it wouldn't hurt to learn some.

On a personal level, I think people who learn Latin, the 'dead language', are morons. Its a dead language for a reason.
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People learn Latin because of it being the basis of many of our modern languages.
 
I still think its a bit pointless to learn it for the pure hell of it, although I suppose if you have a good reason to do it then thats fine. I wouldn't waste my time with it though.

And even though it is the basis of lots of languages is it necessary to learn in order learn another language? Would it help?
 
If you learn Latin, you learn an enormous amount about English. I think every English speaker should know some of the more common Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, and suffixes, because they make up so much of our language.

To those saying learn Chinese: remember, there’s no such thing as “Chinese”. China has a gazillion different dialects, although it is true that Mandarin is by far the most common dialect (though even within Mandarin there are many variances amongst the provinces). I remember a story I heard Julia Sweeney tell on the radio about how she was touring China years ago, and her two touring guides were both Chinese, but they couldn’t understand each other’s dialects, so they both spoke to each other in English. There’s no doubt in my mind that most Chinese businessmen probably learn much much much more English than most American businessmen can hope to learn Mandarin.
 
Sage
There’s no doubt in my mind that most Chinese businessmen probably learn much much much more English than most American businessmen can hope to learn Mandarin.
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Yeah, good point.
 
If you are planning on becoming a linguist learn Latin since that is more or less what the classes are in the beginning. Linguistics is a sub-field of Anthropology so I have to take a few of the classes throughout my university stay. I will tell you right now unless you are focused 100%, are a hard worker, and aren't disappointed by failure, then it isn't for you. They are some of the hardest classes I have taken.

Like I said Latin is important to learn since there are so many Romance languages and German is important as well for the obvious Germanic languages. Learn those two and you will have an easier time learning other languages...except maybe Icelandic and Welsh since I am still confused on how to speak them.
 
My gf is in lingustics and she's learning Hindi now. Seems like a good thing to learn, if you make sure to learn devanagri with it.
 
Don't bother learning Dutch, it's a waste of your time.

Important European languages: English, Spanish, French and German.

Important global languages: Chinese, English, Spanish.
 
kikie
Don't bother learning Dutch, it's a waste of your time.

Important European languages: English, Spanish, French and German.

Important global languages: Chinese, English, Spanish.
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spanish? i though it was only important in america and mexico...


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I forgot to mention that I am taking half a year of English which as my format for it turns out is basicaly learning latin. and i took latin during the summer for kicks.
 
BayConRong
spanish? i though it was only important in america and mexico...


_______

I forgot to mention that I am taking half a year of English which as my format for it turns out is basicaly learning latin. and i took latin during the summer for kicks.
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:rolleyes:

Spanish is the most spoken language in the world after Chinese.
 
Omnis
:rolleyes:

Spanish is the most spoken language in the world after Chinese.
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This shows it's fifth after Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and English.
http://encarta.msn.com/media_701500404/Languages_Spoken_by_More_Than_10_Million_People.html

However, this shows it forth.
http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html

A lot of people speak Spanish but Spain's influence wasn't as great as Britain's and there are just a lot of people in both India and China. But I do wonder how they classify Chinese since there are so many different dialects of it.
 
Yeah but I base mine on the number of native speakers. That is, after Chinese, Spanish has the 2nd largest monoglot population. Therefore, it is more important to learn Spanish than Hindi, for example, because it is far more likely that Hindi-speakers also know English while Spanish-speakers do not.
 
Then where did you get your data?

The Encarta link is showing you only first languages of people, not people that can speak multiples.
 
I got the same Encarta link off wikipedia which shows Spanish as fifth. There is no way it's second after Chinese.
 
mebbe because it isn't counting people who speak it, but countries?

There are possibly more countries where Spanish is the official language than English, Hindi or Dutch.
 
Joey D
I got the same Encarta link off wikipedia which shows Spanish as fifth. There is no way it's second after Chinese.
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Yeah, I had another look at it and it's Ethnologue's statistics that have Spanish as second.

Anyway, I think my point about Spanish priority is still valid.
 
-Diego-
mebbe because it isn't counting people who speak it, but countries?

There are possibly more countries where Spanish is the official language than English, Hindi or Dutch.
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I don't know, I'd be willing to bet there are more countries that speak a dialect of Spanish then English, Chinese or Dutch. Although the West Indies, South America, and Africa all have a huge mix of languages.
 
It couldn't be countries because China certainly wouldn't be #1.
 
I think your best bet right now is to learn an Arabic language.
 
If you want to make money from this career, I suggest Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Arabic. 👍

Not necessarily in that order.
 
Joey D
I don't know, I'd be willing to bet there are more countries that speak a dialect of Spanish then English, Chinese or Dutch. Although the West Indies, South America, and Africa all have a huge mix of languages.
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Dutch? Do you think so? You have Holland, Belgium, Souh Africa, and the Netherlands Antilles.

A couple off years ago when I was in the USA visiting my penfriends, I went to a museum in Chicago. There was a map or globe (can't remember exactly) with all the language of the entire world on, even all the African languages (dialects). The funny thing is that I looked for Dutch, and I couldn't find it.
In Belgium, when you buy something and you want to read the instructions, you need the know several lagnuages because most of the time, Dutch isn't on the instructions. Asian languages, scandinavian, slavic and so on... but not Dutch.

So I say it again, learning Dutch is a waste of your time.
 
Don't tell Sn00pie[\b] that.

Dutch always seemed incredibly hard, though.
 

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