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Learn a Foreign Language As an Engineer?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the math-is-the-universal-language dept.

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?

4 of 1,021 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on what you want to do by Yold · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Japanese works great for career purposes, too by patio11 · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) Japan is the world's second largest economy (going to be 3rd eventually after China gets big)
    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)
    4) ... almost NO Americans speak business level Japanese
    5) ... this gets in the way of multi-million dollar deals every day of the week

    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.
  3. Re:Suggestions... by Jac_no_k · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:If you're going to live in the US ... by elbonian · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?