Nope.
The project got put on hold, so I left Charlotte, NC and returned to Southern California. It’s been a year and, as far as I know, it’s still on hold.
That’s interesting.
i don’t know if they truly do not appreciate you understanding Japanese but perhaps they are just surprised or not used to having foriegners speak Japanese. I think the Japanese language is not commonly used outside of Japan or by non-Japanese. I am surprised to see foreigners on the street who speak Japanese all the time.
I speak one European and one Asian language - the latter served me very well in my former job.
That said, if I wanted to learn a new language for a career in finance, I would go with Chinese (most important after English) or Spanish (easy to learn if you speak another Romance language, and also fairly widely used). Perhaps Arabic if I was sure I wanted to work in the Middle East.
It would be very, very difficult to develop a high level of proficiency in most Asian languages or Arabic without actually living there though. I was lucky enough to spend a couple years with the chance to practice daily; not sure how I could have done it otherwise.
I was told that by my (consulting firm) management.
To be honest, I think that the workers – the engineers, office personnel, and so on – would appreciate it; I think that the upper management preferred being able to talk in front of us without our understanding.
I know that the one engineer with whom I worked most closely would have been tickled pink if I could have spoken Japanese. And it would have helped immensely in my work as a risk analyst: I had to interview a lot of the engineers, and many times they needed to explain to my colleague – in Japanese – their thoughts, which he would then translate. If I could have conducted my interviews in Japanese, it would have made things much simpler.
Are you serious about wanting to learn Mandarin at your age? Its the most complex language; we have a guy on the ground, bright guy, hard working, mba from wharton, 5 years living and working in China. Just send him back. The guy picked up a pretty good German during his 4 months here. I mean the guy is above average book smart and good with languages. And when I asked our Chinese colleague about his Mandarin she just said that she was able to minimize the misunderstandings fairly well. Okish to survive.
Its just one of the most complex languages on earth. I am with Greenman. Invest in your professional education.
My personal belief: in 3-4 years language will start to become less dividing. Google or whoever will translate it simulataneously. We will be able to communicate real time with anyone. You just put on those damn glasses and read it like the subtitles on movies.
Is learning Mandarin the most effective way to make yourself employable later? Probably not.
However, people manage to obtain high proficiency in complex languages in a year or less if sufficiently dedicated (and, admittedly, with some aptitude for picking up languages). It happened with me, in an Asian language with grammar significantly more complex than Chinese (although easier writing system). Spoken Chinese is actually not that hard compared to some languages, and I’ve known people who obtained a level of high business fluency in around a year.
The guy who lived in China probably picked up the language passively (on the job), which is damn impressive but not indicative of the level that can be obtained when fully committed.
I remember I saw a post somewhere online titled “10 things that make people happy”.
One of them is learning a new language which is not necessary to the learner to make live on.
To that extend, I would pick Arabic. Because it’s a very mysterious language, at least to me.
If I were not Chinese, I would choose Chinese, which I heard is the most difficult langugae in the world. (p.s. I don’t know the difficult part because I was born into it).
I’ve taken some Chinese. In some ways it is difficult, and in some ways it isn’t that difficult. Getting started in Chinese is extremely difficult. However, once you’ve gotten over that hump, it’s not quite so bad (I’m told, I never got over the hump).
What’s easy: The grammar is surprisingly simple. All the declensions and verb-agreements that you need in most western languages aren’t there in Chinese.
There is a lot that’s hard:
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Tonal language. Each sylable can be said in one of four tones, and each tone can (and generally does) mean something different. So you have to get your pronounciation very fine in order to be understood… no getting lazy here. Also, your ear has to be able to distinguish the tones, which is tricky if your brain is trying to remember what a word is before even recognizing the tone.
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Lots of short words. In part because of tonality, which enables more combinations of sounds with fewer total sylables. Chinese words tend not to have as many sylables as western words. What that means is that if you are searching your brain for what the word means, another six or seven words have flown by while you are doing that, and so one trip-up can mean you’ve lost the whole sentence. Extremely frustrating.
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The written language doesn’t help you much with learning the spoken language: in an alphabetic language, if you know how to say things, it generally helps you to read, and if you know how to read, it can help you speak. But in Chinese, just because you know how to say something doesn’t mean you know how to write it. So the spoken language and the written language are like two separate languages that just happen to share a common grammar.
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Mandarin is standard, sorta. You may know how to speak mandarin, and increasingly that is the standardized Chinese language, but there are still all these dialects, so you can’t really understand what they are saying in Shanghai unless they choose to speak Mandarin to you. However, you should be able to manage the written language if you know it.
Overall a tough language, but given all these issues, it’s surprising how simple the grammar is.
So, the upshot is that:
- Mandarin is a bugger to learn, but may be really useful
- Spanish is probably useful in the US (the Southwestern US in particular); less so elsewhere
- French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Japanese: may be useful, but probably unnecessary
- Jive and Scottish are cool, if worthless
^I disagree with “Spanish is less useful”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
#1 most widely spoken language in the world - Mandarin
#2 - Spanish
#3 - English
#4 - Arabic
(And of course, anything that is on Wikipedia must, by definition, be true.)
In my (limited) experience, many Spanish speakers also speak English, and tend to conduct business in English.
Your experience may, of course, differ.
Here in the States, sure. But drop yourself into Latin America and you will discover a whole world of people who don’t speak English.
It is true that major Latin American business leaders speak at least a little English, but you will bond with them better if you can master some Spanish, and there is plenty of local research and news that is accessible only to those who can read Spanish.
I’d have to say that Spanish is probably a better ROI and risk-return than Chinese. If China blows up or devolves into chaos or something, will Chinese still be as useful? If Peru blows up or devolves into Chaos or something, Spanish can still be used in Mexico, and Chile, and Colombia, etc. Plus, it’s not as hard to learn.
It would be nearly impossible for a non-chinese person to learn Chinese with any degree of fluency without living there for many years. You’d be better off learning a western language more closely related to English. In my opinion, Spanish is the best language to learn for an English Speaker. It is the second most widely spoken language. The entire western Hemisphere speaks spanish, except the US, Canada and Brazil. If you can learn spanish, you will be able to learn closely related langueges like Portugues, Italian, Catalan, and French. Lastely, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the US. On my last trip to Miami, I had more poeple great me in Spanish than in English.
For an English speaker, I assume you mean.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had somebody great me in Spanish OR in English. 
And I agree with the Portuguese and Italian. Don’t know about Catalan. Disagree with French. French is extremely different from the others.
For some reason it’s easier to go Portuguese->Spanish than Spanish->Portuguese. It’s pretty straightforward to read either direction, but for some reasons, portuguese speakers understand spanish speakers far more readily than vice versa.
And yes, for a westerner, Spanish is much easier to learn than Chinese. And probably for South Asians too. As for Koreans and Japanese and the like, I really couldn’t say which is harder.
Haha, my typo. Anyway, I agree that french would be harder to learn than the other romance languages, but after learning spanish, learning French will be greatly easier. Aside from the accent, ridiculous at that, they are both romance languages and have many cognates and simlar syntax.
In regards to Catalan, I just threw that out there as an example. Catalan is like mix between French and Spanish with more of a Spanish accent than French. It is spoken in Barcelona and surrounding areas and in Andorra. Many of the words are nearly the same as in Spanish, with a letter or two dropped off. In my opinion, it is a language that the people of Cataluña hold on to for national pride.
English => Spanish => Catalan
Swimming => Natación => Natació
Stadium => Estadio => Estadi
Seat => Asiento => Asient
University = Universidad = Universitat
Bye => Adios => Adeu
Good Night = Buenas Noches = Bona Nit
Thank you very Much = Muchas Gracias = Motes Gracies
I think this is becuase Spanish is more widely spoken and therefore Portugues people have to learn Spanish to some extent, more often than the other way around. Look at Portugal vs Spain just in size and economic power and Brazil vs. the rest of central and South America.
Definitely no on Cantonese and Japanese.
I’d say Spanish #1 and Mandarin #2.
I’m not talking about learning and exposure, though it might seem that way. I’m actually talking about walking right up and understanding it straight out of the box.
I’ve never taken a Spanish class in my life. I speak Portuguese fluently after living in Brazil for several years. And as long as they speak relatively clearly, not too fast, and don’t use slang, I can pretty much follow a conversation in Spanish with virtually no problems. But for some reason it doesn’t work the other way around. I can’t speak Portuguese and have them understand me, and other native speakers report the same. I can basically speak Spanish now - yes, I make a lot of mistakes and sound like a Brazilian, and people laugh, but I can function in a Spanish speaking country pretty well, even though I’ve never had a class.
I suspect it’s because the nasal sounds in Portuguese throw people off, and because there are some contractions that are wierd for spanish speakers, especially because one of them is “no”.
I gather that there are other langauge pairs that are a little like that: Dutch/German, Russian/Polish, etc…