<p>There is no particular reason for the constant moving, just circumstances. I am probably going to move a couple more times in the next few years before finally settling down somewhere....hopefully in France.</p>
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<p>Latin, obviously... It strengthens your English (or any other Romance language for that matter), and enriches you in ways that one can only understand when studying this fascinating language.</p>
<p>Languages like Spanish/French/German/Russian can be useful, but trust me, I have learned both Latin and Spanish and Latin has been more beneficial for me than Spanish - by far.</p>
<p>How many situations will you encounter (living in America) in which Spanish will become useful? yes, a fair amount, but let's face it - if you are succesful in life you won't get that many opportunities to talk to people who speak only Spanish.... unless you have a Zing for traveling in that big crap hole called South America. And chances are you won't travel more than once or twice to Europe every 10 years or so.</p>
<p>On the contrary, Latin comes to use almost every day! Aside from helping you out on the SATI verbal (statistics show that Latin scholars score an average of 100 points higher than others!), the rich English vocabulary that Latin equips you with is a gift that will serve you for life. How many non-Latin scholars know what the words 'defenestration' and 'lapidate' mean?
In my view, learning Latin is a shortcut towards becoming an intellectual, and will certainly come in handy if you're aiming towards the Ivies.</p>
<p>What's up with the lovefest with Latin? And btw, English is not a romance language. It is a Germanic language. Romance languages are Portugese, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, and French.</p>
<p>The best language to learn depends on what your job/location is.</p>
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<p>you're absolutely right, English isn't a Romance language.
What I meant was that it is a member among the group of languages that is
significantly affected by Latin.</p>
<p>I would say the most related romance languages are spanish and italian. i'm puerto rican and have watched italian movies and have been pleasantly surprised that i could understand a lot of the movie without looking at the captions. it's so cool to understand a language without even ever studying it or being around it. now i just have to learn to speak it.</p>
<p>as for french and spanish...not really as similar as one would think. given they are both romance languages, but they sound extremely different and i could understand less phrases, words, and sentences than in italian. when i went to paris i really couldn't communicate any more efficiently by speaking spanish than i could english (if the frenchman/woman only spoke french of course.) and when watching "amelie" (french movie), only when i read the captions and then remebered how that had sounded in french could i make the connections to spanish for many words.</p>
<p>portugese is somewhat similar to spanish. less than italian, but more than french.</p>
<p>haven't really heard romanian spoken enough to judge whether it's really similar to spanish or not. no idea.</p>
<p>but if you want to learn romance languages, i recommend spanish and italian because they are the two that sound the most alike and are the easiest to learn. i don't personally know if spanish is easy to learn since i've grown up speaking it, but i've been told it is, and i would think so.</p>
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<p>Well if you are thinking about getting into business then go with Chinese since it's economic growth is unprecedented, up 5.3%? Somewhere around there.</p>
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Twinki:</p>
<p>Well if you are thinking about getting into business then go with Chinese since it's economic growth is unprecedented, up 5.3%? Somewhere around there.
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<p>So Chinese is the best language to learn if you're going into business? Any other good languages for this field? I took Latin from 8th-11th grade. Back then I loved it, but 11th grade ruined it for me. The class was rough. So now I'm looking for something different to take in college.</p>
<p>I'm gonna agree with many and say Latin. I wish I knew it. It is so cool. Now I am stuck with blah French.</p>
<p>xhohosntwinkiesx, you will be thankfull you learned French. I took 8 years of Latin. Sopke it fluently at a point. I even read a couple of books in Latin. But after 10 years of not using it much, I remember very little. French on the other hand is a language you can put to good use...and let me tell you, you can really seduce potential lovers using it! hehe</p>
<p>In my opinion learning Esperanto was a great investment (for me), it's made learning other languages alot easier. You can learn more about it at Wikipedia, its really rather interesting. Although you may not use it much in real life, it's alot easier to grasp other languages after learning it.</p>
<p>As for Latin, it has yet to be useful for me :(. Although I suppose that will change once I learn more of it, and if I decide to go into law or something =/.</p>
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So Chinese is the best language to learn if you're going into business?
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<p>Keep in mind that there's no such language as "Chinese". I think Mandarin's more useful than Cantonese.</p>
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<p>The common "Chinese" that people think of is Mandarin. There are more than 800 million native speakers of Mandarin in the world today (the most spoken language). China is an up and coming power (growing at a surprising rate), but not just as an economic/business power, but a world power, dominating a number of industries. IF you are thinking about business, I would say Chinese would be a good bet, however keep in mind, Chinese is not the easiest language to learn for a native english speaker =P.</p>
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<p>I'd go with ancient Aramaic. I have a feeling that it will have a BIG comeback soon.</p>
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<p>Probably Spanish (for pleasure) and Turkish (relevant to my academic area.)</p>
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<p>To learn? Spanish or Latin or maybe even Arabic</p>
<p>To know instantly without the pain of learning? Mandarin Chinese.</p>
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