hey guys...ill be a senior next year and am working on my fall scheduling. Im a german and econ major so i have three classes in those subjects. i still have to take one more of whatver. i want to pick up another language but am having trouble deciding which one.

1. Chinese
2. Arabic
3. Hindi
4. Korean
5. Bengali

I want to take chinese but it meets 4 times a week and i have some hard econ classes. the others meet three times a week so im thinking hindi right now but korean and arabic are also appealing...

any experience or advice for someone who knows nothing about any of them

andrew

 

Chinese or Arabic for sure. These languages are spoken in more countries than Korean is. These two languages are always in demand, and being able to speak them will significantly improve your career prospects, while speaking Korean will be extremely limiting for you, since only two countries in the world speak that language, and we have trade embargoes against one of them =)

 

one semester of a foreign language isn't going to do jack for you I imagine. I would spend my money on something applicable to my major(s) (in the same field, even if not a requirement), and learn the language on my own.

 

I see that you have Hindi/Bengali on there. I can understand why you would with India steadily becoming a growth area. However, India's business population largely use English more and more as a first language. You won't really see any advantage to learning Hindi/Bengali.

Of your list I would suggest Chinese (Mandarin). China seems to be a country that largely use a chinese dialect as their main language in a business environment.

 

Ebonics


seriously though, if you learn Arabic or (sp?) farsi, you can get a nice cushy and IMHO fascinating job with FBI or CIA. If I could do it over I would consider it. If a person goes into the military you can try to go to the Defense Language Institute and learn that stuff and get to work a couple years in military intelligence.

My friends brother did something along those lines and is FBI counter terrorism.
He and his wife live under a fake name and he gets to drive around an unassuming government sedan with a trunk full of fairly cool weaponry.

Far more interesting than what I do. If you have any interest in that sort of thing, CIA usually does recruitment on major college campuses, and I called the FBI when I was in college to see if someone could talk to me about a career, and an agent was more than happy to have me come in for a couple hours. My eyesight was too lousy to get in though.

 

Take Chinese but learn how to read and write it more so than speaking it. The reason is that Chinese is a toneal(sp?) language and people from different regions in China will say the exact same word in a different tone and it will mean something totally different which makes it very hard for even the Chinese to communicate with people from different regions.

 

I know a lot of Hindi speaking Indians. All of them (well, the younger ones of course) were required to learn english while in school. Many Arabic speaking countries require students to learn a second language, and many select english.

 

it wont be worth it if all youre doing is 1 semester, unless you plan on taking the same language in the fall and so on. languages like chinese and arabic are going to take you much longer than 1 semester to pick up.

take a bio course!

 

Chinese yo if you want to excel in international business. I think it's easier for Indians to speak understandable English because the phonics aren't so far off like those of the east asian cultures.

 

If you're planning on international business at all Chinese is your best bet. Japanese is a good one. And if you haven't thought of it already Spanish is incredibly versatile both domestic and abroad. Latin/South America are very rapid growth areas.