What is the most practical Foreign Language to Learn?

That might depend on what you want to do.

And where you want to GO.

chinese

Chinese.

@nextm & asmonet why would chinese be the most practical?

Because there is like a billion of them. Business is booming with them. Fifteen years from now, there are gonna be a lot more Chinese speaking people. It’s also one of those seemingly odd but useful languages for pretty much any field you want to go into.

Klingon.

@Astro I’ve always wanted to be a Jedi Knight. :)

@mangeons: Trek not Wars?

Chinese because when they want the money back that we can’t pay, they’ll just take us over and make everyone learn it.

In the slim chance that that doesn’t happen, I heard that in 30 years Latinos will be the majority in the U.S.

@Astro & mangeons I love Battlestar Galactica!

@asmonet Psssshh, lol I don’t know which is which!

Chinese (spoken by 1/5 of the world’s population) is not a language; the primary ones used in China are Mandarin and Cantonese with dozens of dialects.

”
“Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, though all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, though some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.”

@gail So you think the most practical foreign language to learn is one of these spoken in China?

Yiddish. If only for the enhanced ability to kvetch.

@shilolo, where is Yiddish common in the world more than other languages?

Very good idea to learn Mandarin, it’s the new lingua franca or will be soon. If you’re already conversant with French, you can learn Spanish easily, without using up college credit on it.

Not knowing Spanish in the Americas is lame.

French is beautiful but not practical. I should know.
Je le parle aussi bien, moi. Il y a plusieurs etats en Afrique ou on le parle, mais le monde
pour personnes parlant seulement francais est de plus en plus petit. (please deploy accent marks as needed..)

Spanish

Sorry mangeons. That was said tongue-in-cheek. I was being a schlemiel.

To answer your question directly, either Spanish or Mandarin would be the most pragmatic choices, whereas French or Latin would be the more romantic choices.

@queenz: I cannot answer the question; I am simply clarifiying that one doesn’t learn “Chinese.”

Yiddish is a lingua franca spoken by many older Jews whose first language was Russian, German, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Polish, etc.

Susan, pour toi. ``````, ´´´´´´´´´´´, çççç, ˆˆˆˆˆˆˆˆˆˆ, Je le parle •assez* bien. Et; les pays où on parle français aujourd’hui ne sont pas nombreux.

If you live in the US the languages are English, Spanish and then followed by chinese, as far as population goes, so I would stick with these if you plan to live in the US. Globally, I think that chinese/japanese would be helpful, or if you plan to go into engineering, German maybe.

@blue: Where are you getting those facts? German and French are way ahead of ‘Chinese’.

In my grad courses they broke down which nationalities were rising the fastest in the US, and then which populations were the largest globally, and this is the information we were presented with. It was 2 years ago, but I can’t imagine that it has changed drastically

Ah, see the way you phrased it, you seemed to be saying that Chinese was the third most common language. Which is not true, and it (most likely Mandarin) won’t be for many years, if ever.

For me it would be Spanish. I have always worked restaurant and construction jobs. Im frequently around Spanish speaking people. I know a little but being fluent would greatly benefit me in these professions.

Spanish has helped me as well, just traveling, and working retail and trying to help our customers that don’t speak English well, and now with my current job working with latin america. It comes in handy

spanish! i took german to be different and because i was born in germany, was it fun? yes, i loved it. but as far as practicality and actual usefulness in the USA most people want spanish speaking people.

now, mandarin chinese or cantonese chinese is a good worldly language to learn as well as japanese especially if you’re going into the video game industry lol

learn the french language if you think it’s beautiful and love fashion and dream of visiting france.

german just because it’s wonderful and in reality Hindustani is the 2nd most spoken language in the world. hopefully, that helps with making some executive decisions.

thought i’d attach this most spoken languages

@asmonet- Blue is correct. Cantonese (not Mandarin, which is the most spoken language in the world) is the third most spoken language in the U.S. Of course, English and Spanish being number one and two.

depends on where you live. spanish would be the most practical for me to live considering where i live in south florida. french would be more helpful in most parts of canada and some states here, etc.

I would say Chinese. And if you’re learning Chinese, don’t learn Cantonese, unless you’re going to work in Hong Kong only. Learn Mandarin/Putonghua, it’s usable everywhere in China and Taiwan. More and more people in HK are learning Mandarin, and it’s fast becoming a sought after skill in jobs. I am from Hong Kong by the way. And I speak Cantonese.

For Western languages, I’d say if you’re living in the US, Spanish and then German, but in Europe, the other way around.

@AstroChuck: Mind linking me to where you saw that? Cause when I googled I didn’t get that. :(

Even when learning Spanish, there is a wide choice of dialect and regional accent. The countries of Central and South American (ignoring Brazil, of course) use Spanish that sounds very different from the Cathstilion with the lithp that I learned in college. And there is the interesting issue of speed. Boy,do most Spanish-speaking people in NYC speak fast.

@asmonet- I’ll find you something online to link to. I’ve read it on more than one occasion. I have about a million (slight exaggeration) books on language..

Still so many answers and really the point is what language do you NEED to know. When was the last time you were in a situation and said “Damn if I only knew how to speak ______, this would be so much easier.” What ever you filled in _______ is what you need to take. So my answer is _________.

If you go and learn Mandarin, and find out that your local chinese deli is full of Cantonese speakers (which mine is by the way) then You should have learned Cantonese even though Mandarin is more widely spoken. If you were married to me, and wanted to understand what was going on at my parents house during the holidays you would need to learn Azorian Portuguese, which is what my husband is painfully trying to pick up (just as painful for me as it is for him, I assure you).

Do you know any deaf people? American Sign Language counts as a foreign language credit in most states (no all, cuz they think it’s still ok to oppress deaf people)

@ac: Thanks. :)

@Noon: ASL is super useful. You never know when you’ll run into a situation where you need it, but when you do it’s so awesome to be able to whip it out. (I also carry around a notebook and pen at all times. Mostly for me, but also for the odd conversation.)

in the U.S., spanish, chinese, russian, to a degree probably arabic of some dialect (especially if you’d like a government job). depends also on what part of the country you live in – out west, more asian languages, the south – spanish, northeast – well, just about everything….