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?

Comments

If you're going to live in the US ...

[trolltalk.com]

If you're going to stay in the US, you might as well increase your value by learning spanish.

If you're looking at the EU, learn spanish, italian, german, french, or russian.

If you're looking in asia, mandarin.

If you're looking at india, hindi (or PROPER english).

Re:If you're going to live in the US ...

[owlnation]

If you're looking at the EU, learn spanish, italian, german, french, or russian.

Italian is only spoken in Italy and a tiny part of Switzerland. Spanish only in Spain, and Spain is more of a Second World country. Neither will get you very far anywhere outside of those respective countries. It's not like the in the Americas -- people don't speak Spanish much in the EU -- other than tourist Spanish anyway... There are more Poles than Spaniards, you'd be better off learning that than Spanish.

French is widely spoken. German is widely spoken (in fact, it has the highest number of native speakers of all languages in Europe)(though not always welcome). Russian is rarely spoken outside of Kaliningrad and Karlovy Vary, but is widely understood (though rarely very welcome.)

How else are you going to meet girls

[Yergle143]

This X-engineering student notes that adding German to my curriculum tacked one extra semester onto my studies. To say it was not encouraged is understating the case: I was told not to waste my time. Years have passed and the rest of my studies are some vague blur involving plumbing; but I can still speak German. Learn Mandarin. ---537

As one who's studied a few languages,

[Pollux]

I would recommend holding off on learning languages at the University unless you are either interested in the language or intend to pursue a career in a place where that language is spoken.

My experiences with foreign languages:

• I studied German in high school. Haven't spoken a lick of it since, and I can't remember a single bit of it.
  
• I studied Norwegian in college. I enjoyed it, because I had a few Norwegian friends, plus it's part of my heritage. I put a lot more effort into it, and got a lot out of it. But, I haven't spoken or studied it in five years. I can't remember much of it anymore.
  
• I studied Arabic my first year out of college. I taught Mathematics in Egypt for a year. I heard the language everyday, so learning it was easy (thanks much in part to having a great tutor). I used Arabic every day, and as a reward learned vast amounts of knowledge about the people and their culture because of it...not to mention all the times I stopped Arabs from conning me or my family out of money by chewing them out in their own language. I can still speak what I've learned to this day, even though I haven't resided in Egypt for four years.

If you know what you are going to college for, then work towards that goal. Don't take a foreign language just because you think you should. It will usually end up being a waste of time. You will appreciate a foreign language far more if you actually learn it while living in the country where it's spoken, and you will retain it far longer than learning a language only from a book. There are great career opportunities overseas for engineers...always have been, always will be, and I strongly recommend pursuing one, even if it's only for six months to a year. Then, while you're there, study up on the language. When you're there, then it's incredibly rewarding.

Re:Too Late

[stephanruby]

It is much easier to learn a foreign language when you are younger.

This is part truth and part old wife's tale. Yes, there are some things in a language that are more difficult to learn once you're older.

But no, the reality is that with proper immersion most adults can learn a new foreign language in twelve weeks or less (and in some cases depending on the language itself, that includes a rudimentary level of reading and writing in that language as well). Now how many 2 year olds, 6 year olds, or 10 year olds, do you know that can do the same in twelve weeks or less?

The truth is that with proper immersion, most kids will learn a new foreign language over a year -- or over several years, it's just that we don't really count their time -- the same way we adults count our own time (after all, we have things to do as adults, and them -- the kids -- the kids seem like they're wasting their time watching things like Pokemon). And it's also partly based on the fact that for those of us who did learn a foreign language as a kid, we didn't really remember how we learned it -- so we just assume -- that in hindsight -- it must have been really easy and really fast.

Re:The language of engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a German native speaker. I assume German to be a bit harder to learn than e.g. Spanish, but as a native speaker I can't really estimate this.

I wonder a bit whether you do not have learned any language at school? In Germany you *must* learn a foreign language (normally English). In high school ("gymnasium" - not quite as high school in U.S., but more or less similiar) people must even learn a second foreign language (often French or Russian). I personally have learned English, Russian and Latin at school as well as Swedisch at the University (just for fun, want to go to Sweden for a term).

Generally I assume that - while you don't really need another language besides English if you stay in western countries - other languages will make it easier to get into contact with local people.

From time to time one gets the (I hope false) impression that U.S. citizens aren't that aware of the world outside U.S. (e.g. surveys like "show us the U.S., the Iraq, ... on the world map and 40% of the U.S. fail). Maybe a foreign language can prove you to be "world aware" and ready to accept other cultures - besides U.S. and the language(s) you've learned.

For sure learning a foreign language is though work. Some of my friends do play the piano, guitar or do sing really god. All those skills are not required for business but are nice to have. I do anger a bit to have quit flute lessons early in childhood, because it makes live more cultureful and pretty. I am 23 right now - too old to start learning an instrument again. My opinion: start with another language. It can only be an enrichment to life. (and well, you can still quit in case it doesn't appeal to you.)

Re:Where are you planning on working?

[wumingzi]

It seems to me that if you are planning on working in the United States, your time would be better spent focusing on your Computer studies. Most foreign engineers here speak English.

1) I strongly advise learning a foreign language just to make yourself a better person. My Mandarin is pretty good, and my Spanish is -- well, enough to get me in trouble when in Spanish-speaking environments.

2) While there are good reasons to learn foreign languages for business purposes, especially if you already have plans on joining the dark side and working for purchasing/marketing/logistics, etc., speaking from a CSci/Engineering point of view, English is the lingua franca of scientific work, and will probably remain so for some time. There are two up-and-coming economies, India and China. University-educated Indians speak English. Chinese for some structural reasons is not likely to become a replacement for English soon. I will explain.

One of the strengths of English is it's effortless ability to absorb foreign words when it becomes necessary to do so. Thus we have acquired cryptography (Greek Kryptos), carnivore (Latin carne and vorare), and otaku (Japanese Otaku), etc. etc.

Chinese cannot do that and maintain the "structural integrity" of the language. Chinese is written in characters. Characters generally apply to meaning. There is no katakana alphabet like Japanese to phonetically express words of foreign origin. While there are exceptions; "coffee" becomes ka fei and "Coca Cola" becomes ke ko ke le ("Happiness in the mouth". No kidding. The "bite the wax tadpole" of urban legend would be a completely different set of characters, and is seldom if ever used). More frequently, things and concepts become Sinicised. "Hard drive" becomes ying die (hard platter), "Printer" becomes yin biao ji (imprint display machine), and "postmodernism" becomes hou xian dai zhu yi (after modern period principle/ideology), etc. etc.

The end result of this is that most hardware engineering in China is done in English. There is generally no parallel chipset documentation put out by UMC or Taiwan Semiconductor documenting the timing and logic in Mandarin, as it would serve no purpose but to drive everyone insane.

If you DO learn to speak Chinese, you will get 50,000 cool points with your Chinese-speaking colleagues. Whether it will ever add a dollar to your bank account I can't say. It hasn't done anything for mine.

Either a Latin Language, or a "Weird" One

[W. Justice Black]

I took both Japanese and French. Ramifications:

With Japanese, I understand i18n issues EXTREMELY well (word order, multi-byte charsets, the horrific beast that is iso-8022-jp, input methods, etc, etc).

With French, my understanding of English grammar and its idiosyncrasies was much improved. As an added plus, my wife thinks it's sexy :-).

Neither is probably an optimal second language for an English speaker, but they illustrate two goals that are different from the one you imply (i.e. to understand stuff written in a different language).

A language that has some similarities to your native tongue will grant you a much better understanding of your native tongue (plus it will be easier to learn because of cognates, etc).

A language that is radically different from your native language will open your mind to very different patterns of thought (without the flashbacks ;-) ). Particularly for i18n code (and everyone's writing i18n-friendly code, right?), this is a big deal.

I won't be reading any heavy tech papers in either language, but the experiences have been invaluable.

My suggestions: Spanish for the Latin language, maybe Mandarin or Japanese (still) for the "weird" one.