

Ask HN: Which oral language (after English)... - iamgabeaudick

would be most useful for a programmer to learn?<p>Just curious.
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byoung2
Aside from English, I speak Spanish fluently, Japanese conversationally,
Tagalog passably, and I'm learning Portuguese and Italian. I know enough
German to sing 99 Luftballons, and enough Latin to translate some of the
classics. I wouldn't say any of these have been at all useful in my
programming career. I've worked with offshore programming teams in Malaysia,
the Philippines, India, Belarus, Mexico, and Pakistan, and they all spoke
English better than I could ever hope to speak their native language (except
Spanish, but even then the guys in Mexico I work with were schooled in the
US).

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quant18
You could try learning something really obscure. As far as I know I'm the only
hacker within 1000 miles who speaks any Mongolian as well as fluent English.
Someday, two buyers are gonna show up in that market and keep bidding against
each other till my rates go to the moon! Dreaming about that day is much more
fun than trying to compete with tens of thousands of
(French|Chinese|Spanish|Russian)-English bilingual programmers. In the mean
time, I try to hang out at a webforum from time to time and answer random tech
questions in Mongolian, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. (Or less
charitably: I can't sell my skills, so I give them away for free).

To be perfectly serious, the recommendation for what language is "useful" to
learn really depends on your own language learning skill --- which is a
combination of inborn talent, knowing what learning methodologies suit you,
and experience with compensating for a bad environment (e.g. I assume you live
in the U.S. and attend an Anglophone workplace everyday).

Spanish is a pretty typical answer to this question not because it's the "most
useful" but because it's not that hard for English speakers to learn, it's
more widespread in the U.S. than other foreign languages, and it even has some
applicability in tech (a lot of people I've seen suggesting moving to Latin
America to cut your cost of living while you bootstrap your startup).
Chinese/Japanese is somewhat harder to speak, a lot harder to read, a lot
harder to get a visa to the country as a one-man startup, etc.

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JacobAldridge
My favourite quote from _Eat, Pray, Love_ was (roughly) "Why would you learn
Italian? So that if they ever successfully invade Ethiopia again, you'll know
a language which is spoken in two countries?"

With that in mind, it makes sense to learn Spanish, which is spoken through
much of Latin and South America. Chinese (Mandarin) has replaced Japanese as
the 'next big economic language', so if you're looking to converse with a
large new market, then perhaps Mandarin.

But for me, I dream of taking up French again. Limited global reach. No
economic benefit. But I love the way it sounds coming out of my mouth. Does a
form over function answer negate the 'useful for a programmer' part of your
question?

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davidw
Italian is spoken in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland, and is also an
official language in the Croatian region of Istria, which was long a
possession of the Republic of Venice. That said, yeah, it's not terribly
useful in the world at large, but the food is good, the girls are beautiful,
and the countryside is stunning in its variety.

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WildUtah
Lots of important products are designed and developed in Japan and usually are
translated into foreign languages quickly but you could get a jump on
developing for whatever Sony or Nintendo is doing with Japanese. Japan has a
big internal market you might want to do l10n for it sometime, also.

The products designed in Japan (or California) are likely to be manufactured
in China. If you want to participate in the final production and delivery of
products you program, you'll want to consider Chinese. China's internal market
is a desert of failure for software sales, though.

So on a technical basis I'd suggest 汉语 (Chinese) or 日本語 (Japanese). Too bad
they're among the hardest written languages in all human history to learn.
Save yourself the trouble and pick Spanish, the Internet's third or fourth
most popular language. It's not a hotbed of technology but if you're living in
the USA, you'll need it soon enough if demographic trends continue.

~~~
byoung2
After 4 years of studying Japanese, I can speak enough to carry on a
conversation with strangers in Tokyo, order food in a restaurant, and flirt
with girls. Writing is a different story, though. I learned hiragana and
katakana, but nowhere near the 2000 kanji that a high-schooler knows. I doubt
most people would learn enough Japanese to be able to work in a highly
technical field where Japanese is spoken and written.

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edanm
I'd vote Spanish (lots of countries speak it, which makes it a good language).
Or Chinese - more people speaking it than any other language, I think.

BTW, I started learning Spanish using the "Pimsleur method". It's an amazingly
easy and _quick_ way to learn a language, If you're looking for a way to learn
a new language, I recommend looking it up.

~~~
secret
I speak English and Spanish and was using the Pimsleur CDs to learn Japanese.
I can't recommend it enough. I gave up when I had no one to talk to and yet
after several years, I still remember quite a bit.

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DanielStraight
Germany and Japan have big tech cultures.

~~~
po
I know a tiny bit of German and I'm learning Japanese (in Tokyo) right now. I
can say that one of the advantages of a language like Japanese is that it
really gets you thinking about languages in general. You have to learn to
think a different way which is quite interesting.

I guess its sort of like if you learned C++ first, then your next language to
learn should be something totally different like Scheme, Scala, Prolog or
Erlang - not C or Java.

