<p>My career interest is in the business field, more specifically finance. I'm curious what language you would recommend to learn for giving myself an edge to compete more in the global economy. I already know Spanish but it doesn't seem like it would help much in business. I really enjoy languages so I think it would be cool to learn another. I've heard Mandarin and Arabic, but I only have time to learn one. What do you think? Thanks!</p>
<p>im not sure i can answer your question well, but i can tell you that both mandarin and arabic will both be extremely difficult to learn over a reasonable amount of time because they aren’t latin-based like spanish. unless you have a thing for languages, that is.</p>
<p>if you’re jewish, there’s a good chance you already know how to read and write hebrew. in that case you should go to arabic. but if that’s not the case, then really just pick one.</p>
<p>now that i think about it, it would probably be very valuable to know either language, and one wouldn’t necessarily put you at more of an advantage than the other. so flip a coin i guess lol</p>
<p>It’s always good to learn another language, but I don’t see why you don’t think Spanish would be useful for business. Spanish is spoken by 350 million speakers in Spain and Latin America, it is the official language of 20 countries, and, it is becoming common in many parts of the US due Hispanic immigration. Spain has the 9th largest economy and Mexico has the 14th largest. Arabic or Chinese are difficult languages and would be useful only if you can commit enough time to develop competency in them. It really comes down to the part of the world where you expect to do business.</p>
<p>Yeah, I too do not understand why you don’t think Spanish will be useful. True, for those that are accomplished enough, it might not be as useful as mandarin for international business in the future, but the thing is, most people will not ever reach that level. The vast majority will be interacting with people in the community, or within our nation, and the last time I checked, English and Spanish are the two most common langauges, with Spanish becoming increasingly important. Even in my temporary job in IT that I have right now during the summer, I have to work with a lot of Spanish documents, and the 4 years I’ve spent in high school have helped me in editing those documents properly. So I’d say unless you’re fluent already, Spanish is not something to scoff at, but if you really, really want a challenging language, go for Mandarin, realizing that it will take a lot of work. If you want something that’s similar to Spanish that could be useful, you could look into Portuguese, because of Brazil.</p>