[nabs-l] Choosing a Foreign Language

[Adrianne Dempsey]

I speak Ottawa, German, Slovak, and Spanish, though none of them fluently. 
I speak enough to get around and can have deasent conversations. German is 
most like English, Spanish is the simplest, and Slovak is similar to 
pollish.  As far as a base, that depends what languages you want to learn. 
Languages are categorized by type.  Love languages are like Spanish French 
Italian and so on and so on.  A good base for these languages is latten but 
it is not useful on it's own except in the medical and science fields, 
however it will help your command of English and with the love languages. 
Then their are Germanic languages, German, English, Flemish, Dutch, and so 
on, a good base for these is German, but you already speak English, so you 
have your base for that.  Their are the Slavic languages, Slovak, pollish, 
Russian, and so on and so on.  A good base for this is probably Russian. 
But any eastern European language is very good to learn as it is more rare 
that people hear speak them and their are many good jobs in political fields 
as well as social work.  Arabic is a good language for a base of middle 
eastern languages.  Also it is very sought out in a lot of job fields. 
Chinese would be a good language to learn also, as it will most likely be 
the business language of the world in the next ten years or so.  However 
Chinese has pitch changes and their very important if you want to say the 
right thing.  So it gets complicated.  Korean is probably a good language to 
learn in this category, as much business is dun with that country and in 
future allot of political ventures.  Japanese is good to learn for the same 
reason, but it has become a fad in the U.S.and so it would be more 
competition in trying to find a job.  Then their is Swahili and that is 
becoming a universal business language between countries in Africa.  I hope 
this helps some.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Elizabeth" <lizmohnke at hotmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 10:04 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Choosing a Foreign Language



Hello List,

Thank you for all of your suggestions for choosing a foreign language. It 
appears as though most of you would suggest Spanish on the grounds that it 
is a commonly spoken language and is easy to learn. Others suggested that I 
choose a language that would prove to be the most useful in obtaining a job. 
And this is where I hit a crossroad, because if I were to choose a language 
based on this criteria alone, it would most likely be Arabic. However, since 
it took me about a weeks worth of practice to be able to correctly pronounce 
the name of the currently proclaimed President of Iran, I’m not quite sure 
how easy it would be to learn.

My current major is sociology, and when I transfer I am looking at majoring 
in social relations and policy. I am interested in obtaining a career in 
government or public service. I’m sure that I could benefit from learning 
Spanish, but I figure that I could learn it just as easily on my own away 
from the academic setting. Since it is such a common language, I was looking 
for something else that might give me a bit more advantage in securing a job 
and yet still somewhat easy to learn. So does anyone on here have any 
experience in a foreign language other than Spanish? Also, does anyone know 
which foreign languages would work well as a base language for learning 
additional languages?

Thanks,
Elizabeth
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