Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Svetlana]

I will be going back to study in September and I am taking a linguistics program. As part of the program I will have to study two languages. The choices are:

[yingwenlaoshi]

If you're studying the language to learn it, I'd definitely do Chinese and Spanish.

If you're using the language to study linguistics, then I'd use a language you already know.

I studied French Linguistics and learned the fundamentals of linguistics in English in some anthropology courses. Also studied a little Old English. Some parts of my anthropology courses looked at languages I had no idea about like Swahili and we broke down similar phonetic sentences by process of elimination.

If you're studying a language, I don't know how much of it you're going to learn in a university course. They're probably bird courses.

I already have good survival Chinese, but I might take the course to learn more and assure myslef of a good grade.

Arabic would be cool. Japanese would also be useful. I'd actually like to learn some of that.

[giovanni]

If you are Russian, please do not bother learning Spanish. A Russian accent in Spanish is just about the ugliest thing in the world.

[Svetlana]

^ I think you mean American accents are the ugliest thing in the world.... in any language.

[giovanni]

[Smee]

얼마에요?

[yingwenlaoshi]

좀깎아 주세요

[Svetlana]

���� �ڱ� �����̴� �㸦 �����Ѵ�!

[Doogie]

I think Chinese is an obvious choice. I think it's going to be an invaluable language to know. I would consider Spanish or French as your second choice. I'm fluent in French and I absolutely love that language.

[Qinella]

[SPINOZA]

It says this: 공동 자금 고양이는 쥐를 좋아한다!

Gibberish.

[Vancouver]

Chinese and German?

[Son Deureo!]

I should probably qualify this post by saying that I'm American, so Svetlana will probably just ignore what I have to say next. On the off chance that he/she/it can get over the anti-Americanism for a moment or two, I'll post anyway.

Arabic may not be quite as useful as it appears on the surface, as each Arabic speaking country has a very different way of speaking Arabic, and these dialects are not all mutually intelligible. They do read in the common dialect of Modern Standard Arabic, but this is not generally spoken outside of on Al-Jazeera.

If you want to be able to communicate with the largest number of people, your best choices are Mandarin (about 1 billion speakers) and Spanish (330 million native speakers).

As for what would be most useful for business, that is a bit trickier to define. In terms of combined GDP, however, Japanese and Spanish give you access to the largest markets.

Of course, if you're looking for ease of learning, you'd have a big advantage learning French, German, Spanish, or Italian because you speak English, Polish because of your Russian ability, or Japanese because of your Korean ability.

For more information, you might want to take a look at the language profiles on this website. Most of the content was written by non-Americans, but perhaps you will want to wait until a non-American re-posts the URL for you so that you can actually click on it.

[Adventurer]

[huffdaddy]