Bilingual in languages other than Spanish?

[annika08]

Originally Posted by allforcats

I am fairly fluent in Japanese, which I learned after I moved to Tokyo. It's not exactly difficult to learn, because the grammatical constructions are actually far less complex than those of English.

What is "difficult" -- after accumulating vocabulary and daily-use phrases (and the Japense love linguistic puns, so there are lots of them) -- what is difficult is cultural ideas which never enter the minds of Americans. Language expresses culture. So words, phrases, sentences, emphases, and choice of ideas to speak about are actually determined by what a given culture has decided is "reality". I didn't know that until I was working in Tokyo, associating almost all the time with Japanese people, and studying the language formally and from colleagues, friends, TV, etc. and discovered that what matters to Americans doesn't necessarily matter at all outside the U.S. culture, and some fundamental definitions in life are very different, and those are expressed in the everyday language.

So the Japanese language per se isn't really difficult to gather into one's brain. What is difficult is learning how to use that accumulated data, which requires real Japanese teachers. Make sense?

Makes absolute perfect sense. I think this applies for every language; every culture.

You bring up some great points.

[TKramar]

Originally Posted by annika08

I'm just curious; I know that being bilingual in Spanish is almost necessary in any career here in the U.S., but does knowing German help any in this day? What other languages is it good to have a grasp on, other than the Asian/Arabic ones? (And of those, which are most valuable?)

If you live in Pennsylvania or Ohio, and have a lot of dealings with the Amish community, yes, it does help.

In New Orleans, French might be useful. Chicago has a Polish enclave, probably some other Slavic groups there also (Czech, Slovak, Hungarian...). I know of Ukrainian groups in Florida...

I had a boss that was from...Haiti, I think. Anyhow, he spoke French. And we had customers come in that spoke better French than English. I was able to determine that they spoke French, but he had a better grasp on the language and was better able to serve them.