<p>I'm deciding between French or German.</p>
<p>I plan to major in Economics/Finance or PolySci. All the great austrian economic works are written and german and I have heard its a natural language for Economists to pick up.
French is the diplomat language, and I could see myself going into politics one day.</p>
<p>I already know Spanish and I plan to take Chinese in college.</p>
<p>Any recommendations or other rationale for choosing a certain language?</p>
<p>Take German cuz it’s awesome!!! Um honestly, I’ve taken both German and Spanish, and I find German much easier. For one, it’s slower and grammatically more similar to English. German has cases, which will definitely be the hardest part. Word order is more flexible, but there are also some major rules that take a while to adjust to. German has 3 genders, and it’s not like in Spanish, where you can generally tell. Adjective endings take some work, but the idea isn’t very hard. German verbs are also so much easier too. Lol, that probably wasn’t very helpful.</p>
<p>As far as easiness goes, while German is grammatically similar to English, French has also heavily influenced our language too. 40% of our words are of French/Latin origin (i.e. words whose suffixes are -ent, -tion, etc) so you have an advantage there. Check out this chart [right</a> here.](<a href=“http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif]right”>http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif) According to it, French seems to have a stronger influence on English than German itself, even though they’re in the same language family.</p>
<p>Having knowledge in Spanish will definitely help you with French. But it’s really up to you and your preference. French would likely be an easier language for you.</p>
![http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif]right](http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/%7Ejlynch/language.gif%5Dright){kind=link}
