
Learn Russian or Chinese (mandarin)? - Xiba
I'm a CS student with plenty of time left in college, so I've decided to learn a new language for fun and to add to my career. 
I've got it down to either Mandarin Chinese or Russian but can't seem to decide which would benefit my career more. (though I'm getting repelled away from Chinese from what I keep hearing about their tech markets)<p>So which language would you advice.<p>P.S I'm already working on the more technical side   by working on my C++, python and SQL (official mandatory course for my next semester) and being involved in competitive programming.<p>P.P.S I'll be working on this language for at least the remaining three years I have left in college .
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hcho
None. Learn languages of nations which you can sell your skills to. Both China
and Russia have ab abundance of CS students, and are cheaper than you(assuming
you are in US or Europe proper). Plus, Russians seem to be quite OK with
English.

Korean or Japanese, I say.

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Setsuna
Japanese is much easier than both. (This obviosuly doesn't answer your
question but just a tip)

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sabj
Where does this come from? It's nice to have alphabets, but you still have to
learn kanji... All that aside, it is ranked as pretty equivalently difficult
to Chinese by a lot of sources. (foreign service, etc).

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Setsuna
Plenty of loan words and easier to pronounce.

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SHOwnsYou
I am going to go another route.

I only had 4 or 5 friends that really studied language in college. The guys
that studied mandarin, despite being able to speak it in class with a
forgiving teacher, couldn't converse when they got to China. They both said
actual chinese is nothing like what you learn in school. They learned
everything when they got there, despite having 4 years of university lessons.
I also know a guy that studied russian. Same thing. Russia was where he
learned russian. He had to reteach himself everything becuase what he learned
in the states was useless.

So my suggestion is this: if you're going to move to china or russia, then
move there with a couple books and go talk to people. Otherwise, learn french
or italian and use it to get laid.

Most likely, even if you learned a more complex language, you wouldn't use it.
So why not study an easier panty-dropping language instead?

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gruseom
While I love the Russian language, it's hard to argue that it will benefit
your career more than Mandarin.

By the way, don't assume that you can learn a language from college courses.
All they'll do is introduce you to the iceberg. To actually learn, go to a
place where the language is spoken.

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gexla
If the number one language to learn for anyone not already speaking the
language is English, then I would say that Mandarin is approaching number two
because of the rapid rise of China. Also, one of the best online resources for
learning languages started out with Mandarin. Check out chinesepod.com, a
service which I believe was even more effective than my Mandarin college
classes.

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sabj
I would say Chinese, because you will find more general-purpose use from this.
Are you sure of what you want to do? You might change your major, take East
Asian Studies, and do something completely different, as I have known some
people to do in college - so I might not get 100% stuck on which would be
better just for tech, either.

Ultimately, it will take you two-three years to become fairly proficient _,
depending on the strength of your school's program and how intense it is.
However, you should not pursue the language just because you think it will be
good for your career - you should learn a language because you have an
interest in it, too.

(_proficient here means that you will think that you are at all competent in
this language... after 2 years, 5 days a week, you can go to China and impress
your friends by 'surviving' quite well. Certainly, even after three years, you
will be unlikely to really read much of any newspaper, etc. But spoken can be
pretty good at this point.)

Since you have a lot of time left, you could start a course in both and see
which might appeal to you more, though be advised that Chinese seems REALLY
hard at first when you are confronted with four different 'tones' and are just
scratching your head when the teacher constantly tells you you are doing it
wrong. But once you move beyond that barrier, essentially after a few weeks
when you can cope with the concept, things get easier -- grammar is easy, it's
really just about learning more characters, expressions, and the like.

It is true that there are going to be a lot of Chinese CS people, many of whom
will speak (some) English. However, Chinese opens up a lot of opportunities if
you are dedicated to pursuing them. While the pickings are not as easy as they
once were in China, there are still so few foreigners in China (in the grand
scheme of things) that you can get involved successfully in different
ventures, especially as a connector between China and the west.

Be advised that both languages are serious business -- for native English
speakers, Russian is up there, and Chinese is even harder. That is not to
discourage you, but just to say that if you are going to undertake learning
them, you have to be really serious about it. Learning Chinese is a lot of
fun, but definitely will involve a lot of work.

Both countries have some rule of law issues, among other problems, but again,
you have to ask yourself what your intentions are. Languages don't just
translate into some special linear relationship of increased success - you
have to put them to work.

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zeemonkee
I can't advise you on Chinese (having just done a couple of intro lessons)
however I can share some experience in learning Russian.

It's a brute of a language to learn. The alphabet is actually the easiest
thing to learn; it's near enough to Greek that many letters are familiar and
you'll pick it up with some practice.

Vocabulary is hard, maybe not as hard as a non-European language like Chinese
or Arabic, but not as easy as French or German. There are some loan words from
other languages (mostly German, French and English) but you will still spend
more time memorizing vocabulary than just guessing words. Having said that,
many words are made up of common prefixes and combinations, so after a while
you'll be able to rely more on context and guesswork.

Pronounciation isn't too hard - not too many sounds different from English -
but you'll have to distinguish between "hard" and "soft" sounds, which have a
major impact on grammar. Another issue is mobile stress, again with a
grammatical aspect. I'll come to these in a moment. Personally I find spoken
Russian quite hard to understand - words are elided into each other, a bit
like French and unlike, say, German - although my German is very limited
compared to Russian, I still find it easier to make out words and structure in
spoken German. However I don't have a good "ear" for languages so YMMV.

Now for the grammar. No getting round it, it's a major bitch. Russian has
probably the toughest grammar of any language I've learned.

First off, there are a number of grammatical cases, like Latin. However nouns,
adjectives and pronouns have quite a high degree of irregularity, so you spend
a lot of time memorizing exceptions. Verbs are not so hard but you have to
learn the concept of "aspect" (basically, sort of like the perfect/imperfect
in French and Spanish verbs, but I'm oversimplifying). Verbs of motion (go,
come, etc) have a set of rules again. On top of this there is the
aforementioned mobile stress.

For example, "house" in Russian is "dom" (think "domestic"). The genitive is
"d'oma" ("of the house") while "houses" is "dom'a". In other words the stress
(represented by ') moves forward in the plural. With some words, it moves
back, or somewhere else. Same goes with verbs. There are patterns, but no hard
and fast rules. This is probably the hardest part about learning Russian.

Russians also distinguish "hard" and "soft" consonsants and vowels and again,
grammatical endings are affected by this.

So much for the language, but is it worth learning ? I'm not going to make an
economic case - others are more qualified to do so - but I do believe that you
should use the opportunity of college to learn at least a few things that
aren't completely "practical" - you may not have the time or energy to learn
them later and life is not always about practicalities (maybe this is the
wrong place to put forward that argument though).

If you learn Russian, first of all as a mental exercise the rigour will do you
good ! Secondly you may learn just enough to appreciate the wonders of Russian
literature in the native language - Russian has a cadence and beauty of its
own, especially the poetry of Pushkin or the prose of Dostoevsky and Tolstoi.
Finally, it is a major world language, albeit of a dying empire, and a
knowledge of Russian opens up the Slavic world - Polish, Ukrainian, Czech and
so forth (I can understand the gist at least of advertisments and newspaper
headlines in Czech or Polish).

EDIT: one more point is on expectations. As someone else has pointed out in
this thread, college isn't really the place to learn a language, especially in
just a semester or two - at best that's a brief introduction. To really master
the language you have to spend some time in the country, or at least some time
among native speakers (foreign girlfriend, exchange students, immigrant
community, whatever). So if you are just looking at a notch on your CV or a
distraction from CS, that's fine, but don't expect any great progress in such
a short time, especially with a "hard" language like Russian or Chinese.

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malandrew
How about Portuguese?

Brazil is a country that is up and coming just like Russia, China and India,
making it a good market to get involved with as it offers growth prospects and
market opportunities.

On top of that, it's a great country to visit and vacation in.

