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ok I get Chinese is hard, but so is german. In the business world, both the latter will be more important than german or French in terms of business. Sure in the ideal world, you know every language out there.
It really wasn't a choice for me... I have German speaking family and later I was able to get work assignments because I had conversational German... a win/win
I needed 8 hours of a foreign language to get into graduate school, so chose French...
To get into my graduate program, the department also required a "foreign" language. Get this! Statistics was considered a "foreign language" for acceptance into the program.
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How does one know they they can truly communicate in a foreign language? One day, I was in line at my work's cafeteria, (So Cal, so pretty much everybody in the food service industry is a native Spanish speaker), and my mind was somewhere else at that moment. I was asked what I wanted and since I wasn't paying attention, for some reason without thinking about it, I automatically answered in Spanish. The food service guy was quite surprised and asked if I knew Spanish. Over the next few years, we developed quite a nice friendship. He also taught me some "street Spanish", which you can't get from a classroom.
I was greatly surprised one day when I was in a small store in Italy. I don't know that much Italian and the proprietor didn't understand English. When I switched to Spanish, I was able to effectively communicate to him what I wanted, (however, he could not converse back to me in Spanish. Still, he understood exactly what I was saying).
I've been working on my Italian, and it is coming along because it is so similar to Spanish. I'm having a devil of a time with French. Even though a Romance language, it is not coming easy to me, (verbal that is, perhaps it will be a bit easier to read than speak).
My understanding is that orally, Italian and Spanish "sound" similar, but on paper Italian and French "look" more similar. I've also read that Italian is the closest to Latin of any of the Romance languages, so it shares many similarities across the board with the others.
But regardless, if you are a native speaker of (or fluent in) one of the Romance languages, you get a huge "discount" on learning any of the others.
It's funny, the main reason why I took up french was b/c I figured it would be the emptiest class.
It was 2004 and the War on Terror was beginning. This was when America was very anti-french; and they wanted to change the name of french fries to "freedom fries" and associated France with homosexuality, etc. This was when I was in Middle School.
If I can go back in time, I would've definitely taken Spanish. The only languages that my school offered was Spanish, French and Italian. I do like Chinese also but I feel like I wouldn't retain the knowledge if I didn't work with it on a daily/weekly basis. At least with the Spanish language, there are countless Spanish neighborhoods/stores and TV stations where you could speak/hear it consistently.
Also know that french was a great skill at one of my first jobs. I was SURPRISED at how many people in Quebec speak very poor english. There are tons of french-speaking nations throughout the world so I still don't think French is a useless language. However, Germany had very few colonies and just about all of those nations are very insignificant in the world economy.
Last edited by PrestigiousReputability; 01-13-2014 at 07:12 PM..
No one mentions Italian, is it offered in many schools?
My kids both had spanish in middle school, and jumped to Italian in high school...which offered Spanish, Latin, German, Italian and Mandarin...
Wish they offered that when I was in high school. 4 years of Spanish, and when I hear people speaking spanish, I barely get the conversation
My school offered Italian, but I don't know if most schools throughout the country offer it. My region has a huge amount of Italian-Americans so that may be why they offered it.
No one mentions Italian, is it offered in many schools?
My kids both had spanish in middle school, and jumped to Italian in high school...which offered Spanish, Latin, German, Italian and Mandarin...
Wish they offered that when I was in high school. 4 years of Spanish, and when I hear people speaking spanish, I barely get the conversation
Yes, it is still taught and very popular in my area.
French and Italian grammar are similar. But the roots of many words in Italian and Spanish are closer and the pronunciation is closer. In Argentina, many people speak Italian or Spanish with Italian style pronunciation.
At one point, I tried to teach myself Russian, but just couldn't do it, despite being surrounded by Russian speakers.
I've found French very handy to communicate with Haitians, once you get used to the accent. To me it sounds like reggage French. I don't mean Creole, but Haitian French.
People might want to learn a language because they didn't know they would be associating with people who speak it, until they got older, like when you find a boyfriend, girlfriend, or new job. You might also want to learn it because you have family who speak a different language, but wasn't raised to speak it yourself.
I don't understand the persistent opinion that German is somehow a difficult language to learn for an English speaker.
OK, Spanish 101 may be a bit easier than German 101, but after that... Perhaps it is that cognates of Latin origin tend to be spelled the same while German cognates appear different until you understand the spelling shifts
My Middle and High Schools offered French, Spanish, and Italian. I took French. When I went to university I took German, Spanish, Latin, Attic Greek, Old English and Old Norse.
Maybe they find it more atractive, in my school we had French as third language, nowadays the focus more on German and Chinese.
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