Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
What European language would be the best to know for most widespread use in the world, business use, and most interesting. The selection of languages I am thinking about learning are Italian, French, German or Russian. Thank you! Please place your vote! Thanks again!
Voted Italian. Had a friend who had the opinion that Italian must me the best living language as it's closest to Latin and Spanish after Italian for similar reasons. Provided of course you actually have reasons to like Latin.
I'd skip Russian, can't believe we're sharing the same alphabet with them. Literally my least favorite language together with...French - Unexpected but all for different reasons.
Yeah well, I know...I meant: my country uses the same alphabet as them, not saying of course that English uses Cyrillic lol or Russian - Latin.
Gotcha. That crossed my mind but since you said "we" and you're writing in English, I thought you would've clarified. Speaking of other languages that use Cyrillic - I think it's interesting that Russian and Ukrainian, for example, don't use the exact same alphabet - very close but a few differences.
Maybe the OP will come back soon and elaborate on his/her interests regarding language acquisition.
Gotcha. That crossed my mind but since you said "we" and you're writing in English, I thought you would've clarified. Speaking of other languages that use Cyrillic - I think it's interesting that Russian and Ukrainian, for example, don't use the exact same alphabet - very close but a few differences.
Maybe the OP will come back soon and elaborate on his/her interests regarding language acquisition.
Yeah they're similar though: Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian. Can elaborate, but don't want to "hijack" the thread .
What European language would be the best to know for most widespread use in the world, business use, and most interesting. The selection of languages I am thinking about learning are Italian, French, German or Russian. Thank you! Please place your vote! Thanks again!
The world is a big place. English, I suppose.
You need more criteria than world, business use, and most interesting. Which part of the world? What business? What interests? Without more specific criteria, I can't vote.
FYI, I was a professional translator for some 25 years, specialized in finance and Italian, as well as the other major romance languages and Greek, lived in those European countries for many years, as well as South America, found a niche and did quite well.
Interesting? To me, culturally? Hebrew and Greek. Maybe Russian (would have said also Turkish, but things appear to be dicey there recently).
Anyway, to make a living, you have to combine a language(s) with a "hard" specialization, like law, finance, medicine, business, finance, technology, engineering and their sub-specializations, and NOT literature and poetry.
Alright, I'll take a stab at it: in today's world, I would say:
1) law and French or German; or
2) Russian and any hard specialization, esp. military/rocket/space technology; or
3) Italian and ship and especially yacht building (but I'm wondering if even all that is done in English only nowadays even in Italy).
Good Luck!
Last edited by bale002; 03-30-2016 at 05:21 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
- Unexpected but all for different reasons. 
