<p>no sh it sherlock...i was just pointing the lists out for anyone who was interested.</p>
<p>as was i...all i said was that he should take french don't take this stuff quite so seriously.. no one was insulting you and despite your apparent desire to lash out needlessly i'll refrain :)lol</p>
<p>Tpeck, I hope you change your attitude. I worked for American companies in Germany, France and the UK. All my colleagues spoke English at all of those locations. But I managed to make friends with greater ease and perform better in France and England than in Germany. The primary reason for that was language. I am fluent in French and English, but my German is horrendous! </p>
<p>Have you ever seen interviews with World leaders on the news? Many of them insist on speaking in their native tongue and will not speak without an interpreter. Chirac, Shroeder, Putin, Asad, Koizumi etc..., if you ever hear interviews with them, they will only speak in their native tongue. Trust me, they all speak English, but they will not do it in an official function. </p>
<p>In short, you can get by with just English, but learning a foreign language can certainly help.</p>
<p>Bern, Stacey is a Southern belle. Appologize to the young lady.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You'll also be well-positioned to enter a niche market like Cantonese, Shanghainese, or one of the other Chinese languages.
[/quote]
"Shang ho shan wae" Is "you look pretty" in Cantonese. If they wanted Americans to learn foreign languages better, they would put more of it in movies.</p>
<p>I've taken three years of high school german and am going to take a fourth, and it pains me to say, german is a dying language. At one point (and still somewhat today) german was the buisness language of europe. Now, it is steadily becoming english. As far as travel goes, if you know german and english you can get along in almost all of europe, (but be careful when you are in france.) Chineese is a very good language to learn, and so is japeneese, but they are harder because they use different alphabets, and their sounds are unlike english sounds. If you really want to go off the deep end you could learn aribic, they say it takes 10 years to become remotly fluent in the language, in comparison, i am close to fluent in german after three years. Aribic would be a good language to learn if you ever wanted to do something for the government.</p>
<p>I'm speake Chinese perfectly, I'd say this: 4 years of Chinese training at best would prepare you for the common tasks (asking for direction, buying things, registering hotels), there's NO way you can understand any paragraph of Chinese Constitution nor any paragraph in a Chinese business contract, UNLESS you are a language GENIUS.
Speaking is RELATIVELY easy, reading is way harder, writing is probably impossible for some people...I mean, go to <a href="http://www.sohu.com%5B/url%5D">www.sohu.com</a>, and try to imagine what it would be like to memorize all the words on that site....</p>