
Ask HN: What (human) language should I learn? - mcardlej123
English is my only written and spoken language. What (human) language should I learn for the future to make me employable and why? Hindi&#x2F;Mandarin?
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kafkaesq
Whichever one you are passionate about.

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schoen
It depends a lot on what you might want to do and where you might want to
live!

You could look at some stuff like

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_learned_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_learned_foreign_languages_in_the_United_States)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_Commonly_Taught_Languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_Commonly_Taught_Languages)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers)

There are lots of interesting issues about this, for example that some
languages tend to be spoken by richer people, some widely-spoken languages
aren't widely-studied (in a particular place or at all), some languages tend
to be spoken by people who already speak English or another language of wider
communication, some language skills are more interesting to certain
professions than others...

As an example, learning Dutch on top of English would really impress Dutch
people but probably wouldn't help employability much because almost all Dutch-
speakers also speak English fluently.

Learning a widely-spoken but not-widely-studied language might be exciting to
marketers and military/spy agencies.

If you learn an important regional language it would help your prospects for
finding work in that region.

There are also FSI ratings for how difficult languages are to learn, which
might be relevant if you care about how much time and effort you may have to
put into the project:

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Di...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers)

I'll put in a good word for Portuguese, my strongest foreign language: it's
relatively easy for English-speakers to learn, it's widely spoken in absolute
terms, it's relatively little-studied, Portuguese-speakers often really
appreciate foreigners knowing it, and many Portuguese-speakers are monolingual
(or bilingual in Portuguese and something other than English). Using it for
work probably means doing something Brazil-related, and you can think about
whether that's appealing or unappealing to you.

It's hard to argue against the usefulness of learning any of the top languages
on the list of most-spoken languages, but you can see that they vary a lot on
the criteria that I mentioned. For instance, today's Spanish and Hindi
speakers are somewhat more likely to speak English than are Arabic or Chinese
speakers.

You could also look at economic growth in places where the languages are
primarily spoken (faster for Mandarin than for Spanish or Arabic, for
instance).

Anyway, I hope some of these parameters offer interesting food for thought.

Edit: to agree with kafkaesq's point, learning a language that you _enjoy_ is
going to be a lot more fun and probably hold your interest better than one
that you don't, and that is super-worth thinking about too. :-)

~~~
mcardlej123
You raised some very interesting points here. Thanks for taking the time to
provide your insights.

I don't actually want to change where I live (I live in Australia), just want
to make myself more useful when working with contractors etc.

~~~
schoen
In Australia you have a lot of East Asian and Southeast Asian languages spoken
by immigrants, so that might be a useful thing to think about. Bahasa
(including Malay and Indonesian) is said to be easier than Mandarin for
English speakers -- no tones and written using the Latin alphabet! -- which is
said to be easier than Cantonese (six tones as opposed to four, and fewer
instructional materials or accurately written texts useful for learners).

Edit: in terms of the tones, phonology, and writing system (which some people
consider a big barrier), Tagalog and Polynesian languages would also be
relatively easy, and Thai and Vietnamese would also be relatively difficult.
Like Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese have tones and have a writing system that
you won't understand easily from the Roman alphabet (though Vietnamese writing
is based on the Roman alphabet with a variety of additional marks to
distinguish tones and other things). Like Bahasa, Tagalog and the Polynesian
languages mostly don't have tones and their writing system should be quick to
learn for English speakers.

I guess Tagalog speakers who migrate to Australia are more likely to speak
English than are speakers of the other Asian languages I mentioned, because
it's more widely used and taught in the Philippines than in other places in
the area, but lots of combinations of language proficiencies are possible!

Of course, there are hundreds of other languages spoken around the region, so
this shouldn't be taken as an exhaustive list. :-)

