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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?
Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Klingon.
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.
IF, however, you were planning on going abroad, then speaking the local language would get you a lot of "street cred" that you would otherwise be lacking.
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).
Kevin Smith on Prince
There are publications in basically every language in CS/CE. If you really want to learn one, pick from Japanese, German, French, Russian, Chinese.
But it won't do you much good, and in reality, you'll never have time to read foreign journals (or looked at another way, it would be a comparative waste of your time given the quantity of good material you could be reading in English).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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!
With the shear number of outsourced and H1B workers in the IT community, it may well be worthwhile. I haven't taken any foreign language courses myself. But the more I've worked with Russian, and/or Indian programmers, the more I think about it.
I wouldn't let it distract you from your main coursework though, that is most important. Foreign language study should be in line with business courses. Not necessary for starting out, but helpful in moving up.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
When I was getting my BS in Computer Science (class of 08!), I took 3 semesters of Spanish and 1 Chinese. Taking foreign languages forces you to think in new ways, which is what problem solving is all about. Also, Spanish and Chinese are both fairly similar to English, but Spanish was fun for me while Chinese was just a pain in the ass since very few of the words are cognates.
Mandarin Chinese.
If you actually want to enjoy, pick something that you actually have an interest in. Ton of anime junkies have picked up Japanese for example. If you like Bollywood, learn Hindi. And so on...
Hab SoSlI' Quch!
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is it worth my time to learn a foreign language? If so, which one?
Girlspeak.
I'm currently living with four (4) girls (three daughters, wife) all of which are able to speak in riddles and conundrums that they themselves understand, while leaving me completely at a loss of any valuable information.
Interestingly enough, this Girlspeak language transcends cultural boundaries! It is simply amazing how two girls can communicate without actually knowing the native tongue of the other.
The fact is, I've spent half a lifetime trying to understand girlspeak without much progress.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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
Concentrate on what you need to concentrate on, and expand your horizons when it becomes necessary. This will provide the most efficient use of time in almost all cases - provided you don't become so focussed on whatever you're into that you genuinely don't notice when a new skill is required. (That's the only real risk of getting in too deep).
Despite this view on life, I've always had a great admiration for those who enjoy learning activities in their lesiure time. Personally I've always preferred video games.
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
It is much easier to learn a foreign language when you are younger. By the time you get to university the effort is probably not worth it from a career point of view, if you are an English speaker. English is the primary language used in technology fields world wide so you already know the language that almost all research is published in.
That being said, studying a foreign language is enjoyable from a personal enrichment point of view. I studied French in high school and hated it. But later in life I went to work for a French owned company that paid for French lessons - that high school stuff came back quickly, and it made the times I traveled to France on business a more enjoyable because I could interact more easily with the people and surroundings than if I had no understanding of the language. Because of that experience I now enjoy reading and watching French language books and movies.
I think Chinese is an easier language. You don't have to deal with verb conjugation and tenses. Grammatically, it is a simpler language.
It is an easy language to learn. I went to China and saw little kids speaking it, therefore it must be easy.
Fight Spammers!
.... Elbonian.
Have gnu, will travel.
Foreign languages are priceless in today's world of constant internationalization. I work with people form Germany, Russia, Japan, Norway and Brazil. I speak one foreign language and I wish I knew more. In fact, not knowing Spanish has bitten me in the rear because I could have advanced my career by moving to Latin America where I would fly up the corporate ladder. As somebody who got hired (at least once) for my foreign language and IT skills, I firmly believe that speaking a foreign language is a good career boost.
We have been in many situations were customers from Asia and other parts of the world love to pay extra big bugs for specialists who speak their langauge. It is not that they don't want to speak English, it is the fact that they prefer to deal with people who can speak English and their own language just in case. Technical people who know English + one of CJK or Spanish are becoming priceless because Latin American and Asia are booming. When our company was rapidly expanding, we could not hire enough engineers who were fluent in several languages. Those who got hired received more than generous packages and relocation opportunities. While this may not be appealing to a married person with a couple of kids, a young single college graduate will sure appreciate a six month gig in Japan paid for by an employer. This really helps if you end up working in a small (but well paid) field. You help your employer with building a new customer base in a remote part of the world and suddenly you go from a college graduate to a young professional who brought a company XYZ to a new country. As you can tell from my post, I am all about speaking as many languages as possible.
The bottom line is: Learn language if you would like to be qualified for more opportunities when it comes to travel and corporate mobility. If you believe that your current town/city/country is the best place in the world, then do not bother.
You can go to as many classes as you like, but it's an entirely different thing to actually use a language.
Deleted
Can't we just use Babelfish?
For example, a German news story
See? Totally easy to understand...
Don't just learn the language, study abroad -- I took Japanese and spent a term at Kansai Gaidai. The experiences of a) being put into an entirely new environment and b) being forced to set aside engineering for a term, were both invaluable. It was a tremendous aid as well in terms of getting into grad school.
The Chinese have no shortage of engineers. There's tons of them. They need people who speak English and Chinese and are engineers so the Chinese Engineers can talk to their English speaking counterparts and management. Generally speaking, the Chinese engineers ive met have known English, so I haven't had to learn any Mandrin at all to work with them.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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.
Once you know C you can learn any language. ;-)
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
As if any Chinese person would actually eat that Americanized crap!
Don't waste your time learning Wookie -- they're not hiring right now. But if you can speak Bocce then you can get a job on any of the Hutt-controlled planets. What the galaxy really needs, however, is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators. I suggest taking some classes in Human-Cyborg Relations.
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
(define (pigl wd)
(if (vowel? (first wd))
(word wd 'ay)
(pigl (word (bf wd) (first wd)))))
(define (vowel? letter)
(member? letter '(a e i o u)))
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
There is no career/business reason for an American engineer to learn a foreign language, ESPECIALLY if you're already in college and don't know one. You would be far better off spending that time learning more engineering, or taking business classes.
Basically anyone you're going to run into in Engineering is going to know English better than you're going to know whatever it is you take for a few semesters in college.
Now, that's not to say learning a foreign language might not be fun, or a good way to balance out your college experience, or have some classes with real girls in them, but in terms of your engineering career, foreign language is going to have pretty much no payoff.
Caveat: If you are going to be a freshman and want to study a language seriously for four semesters, I would recommend picking one up and studying abroad for your junior year. I lived in Germany for a year after learning German in high school. An exchange program is one of the few opportunities you'll have to be outside the country for an extended period of time. And my German comes in very handy when going to Oktoberfest for vacation.
But, it's been utterly useless as far as the engineering career goes.
paintball
I am a computer scientist working for a major industrial research lab.
English is still the primary language for technology research publications, and will continue to be so for the near future. So don't worry about needing to read foreign journals. Yes some French or German or Japanese might help you find a few more obscure things, but generally if the work is worthwhile it eventually gets published in English.
However, personally I think you should learn Mandarin Chinese. Why?
1) There's a gigantic pool of IT research talent in China that we're only beginning to tap. They publish primarily in English, but their spoken English is generally poor with some exceptions. It's a tremendous benefit to know at least some Chinese in order to be able to socialize with your Chinese colleagues at a conference or when visiting. And I'm fairly certain that if you make a career in research in the next 50 years, you will be visiting and possibly living in the PRC at some point.
2) Research isn't for everyone. If you discover this at an awkward time in your career, it helps to have other skills to fall back on. Being able to speak Chinese is already a significant career asset, and this is likely to continue.
3) Spoken Chinese is a great language to learn, because it challenges a native-English-speaker's conceptions of grammar and meaning. It forced me to think about language in a whole new way, similar to how Prolog completely broke my brain as a sophomore CS undergrad.
All that said, Chinese fluency requires 8+ years of intensive education and immersion to develop; you will most likely never become as proficient in it as you might in a Western language.
If you want to learn a language so as to be able to speak it competently, remember: learning a language is an incredible amount of hard work, especially something like Mandarin or Russian which are quite wildly different from English.
Actually I think it depends on the person and how the language is taught. In college I took classes on campus in both French and German and I took a class in Mandarin Chinese where I was learning Kong Fu. Though we learned writing with both Chinese ideograms and the Pin yin romanization I picked up Chinese faster than either French or German. And my college classes were 3 hours a week whereas I only had one hour a week for Mandarin, then again I got to work with and practice it in Kong Fu. For one thing unlike European languages it didn't have a lot of verb conjugations or pronouns for different genders; der, die, das in German or un, une in French depending on the gender of the subject.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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)
4)
5)
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.
For market reach: Spanish (opens up most of LatAm) and you can extend that to include (Brazilian) Portuguese without too much trouble, Chinese (obvious), Arabic (opens up a huge swath of the Middle East), Swedish (opens up much of the Nordics)
For fun: Italian (absolutely beautiful to hear spoken well and makes non-Italian women swoon), Esperanto (is relatively easy and will make you understandable to just about all Roman and Germanic language speakers), Dutch (if you want to exercise muscles in your throat you never knew you had), Slovenian/Czech (lots of interesting pain in East European culture but you need the language to appreciate it), Japanese (to be amazed about and get rid of your own preconceptions)
For mind expansion: Koshian languages (mentioned elsewhere), Latin and ancient Greek, Romansh, Swahili, Gaelic, Japanese, Indonesian
Forget about French and German unless you have specific reasons to learn those.
So take your pick, but do it as soon as possible: learning a new language is going to be really, really hard once you're past 30, unless you have a knack for it.
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:
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.
If you attempt to learn a language for the sake of your computer career you will almost certainly fail. But if you learn because you are fascinated by a particular culture, you have a hope of succeeding. Wait till you acquire such a fascination, then learn.
US engineering grad schools are dominated by Chinese and Indian students. However you don't need to learn Hindi since Indians speak English in their home country.
And, your next employer will very likely have their largest branch in China or owned by a Chinese trust.
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.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
DO IT. Seriously, this is your big chance to have the time to take a foreign language. I took french in college, did study abroad had a blast and I am fluent in a second language. If you don't do it now you are going to have A LOT of trouble doing it later. Passable fluency in french took me 3 years of college level french, plus about six months living there (half of which was working, the other half on study abroad). You will have a lot of trouble finding the time to do that once college is over. I could go on, but basically there is no reason not to do it. You probably need to take some non engineering classes to graduate anyway, and you are going to seriously regret it if you go through college and never take the chance to do something other than what you're going to spend the rest of your life doing.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Chinese engineers and scientists generally learn their trade in English. When speaking about technical topics, two native Chinese will frequently switch to English.
Don't learn a language for your career unless you have a clear need. Learn a language now that really appeals to you to make learning other languages later easier.
Being fluent in Swedish, Finnish, and English, pretty good in French, and having basic communication skills in German, I honestly can't believe how clueless you are.
It is true that having the opportunity to actually use a second, third or fourth language has a huge impact on your proficiency in said language. But never having lived in a English-dominated country and having been told that I have a larger vocabulary than some natives, as well as having a bunch of local friends who speak two or three languages just fine... I'll just repeat myself, you're clueless.
Then again, living in Europe (Finland) being multilingual is no big deal.
.: Max Romantschuk
Check out this essay - "Mnemonic chains", I explain how knowing multiple languages can help you memorize something that you hear easier.
Basically, when you hear some information (audio input), you transform that input into another language before writing it down - this way your brain makes several passes over the data - so more of it is cached (or dumped to the archive).
I speak Russian, Romanian and English fluently; I always think and write in English, even though everyone around speaks one of the other two languages. I also find myself translating my thoughts from English before speaking - maybe this is somewhat slower, but as this is another chain in the data processing - I get yet another chance to review my thoughts before making them public.
The essay provides more details, and explains which other techniques can be applied to enhance the effect.
The saddest poem