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Learn a Foreign Language As an Engineer?
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?
Russian, Chinese, or Arabic. Bilingualism is a FANTASTIC resume skill, and it will likely pop up more than you think. If I spoke Russian instead of Spanish as a 2nd language, I could have taken a 3 month trip to Moscow with the QA team.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
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
Japan is going to make a huge comeback. And their 3-way writing system is good for your mind. Hiragana will teach you elegance and harmony. Katakana will teach you adaptation. Kanji, though, will just drive you nuts.
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.
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.).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
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)
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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.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
That would be Romansh
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
That's exactly the same as the difference between American English and British English. Actually, in a purely morphological way, it's *less* than the difference between American English and British English.
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.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If you speak a bit of Japanese, fluent in English, and have technical skills, it's fairly easy to find work in Japan. I ended up in a company based in New York operating an office in Japan and I've been getting by with no Japanese at work.
It makes me sad to hear you say that from Spain, it just shows your lack of knowledge.
* Spain is the 8th nominally-ranked GDP country in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
* 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
* 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
But what else can I say? you are way smarter than me... right?