<p>Also, if you want to study German philosophers like Eric Fromm from the Frankfurt School of critical theory, learning German helps. The translations are ok, but sometimes stuff is lost in translation. :)</p>
<p>Cool! D has taken a few semesters of college German, to supplement her self-study. She was pleased to learn that as you say, German appears to have some practical uses, so we shall she how she progresses with it. We do plan to have her translate for us this summer in Germany.</p>
<p>Fogcity- I don’t know what city you live in, but on the west coast speaking a second language is extremely marketable to many companies. Any of the BRIC languages are important. And while there are ‘many people who speak chinese/english’, that is entirely different than speaking english as a mother tongue, and fluent in mandarin.<br>
Learn Tibetan if you like, but the languages you are looking at take several years to learn, so budget your time.</p>
<p>Of course, one othe thing that matters (but hasn’t been touched on) is the quality of your instructors & department. Unfortunately, they aren’t all created equal, so if you have a choice between two languages, you might want to dig deeper & find out which one is stronger in that respect to let that be the deciding factor.</p>
<p>To amplify, one of my daughters is so good at conversational Chinese that Chinese people would ask her if she was raised by a Chinese family. The Chinese kids in her classes would say, “Your accent is better than mine.” But reading and writing? Translating? Really hard. Even reading a newspaper takes a lot. Try translating Mandarin fiction and you’ll spend as many hours as a hard compsci class. </p>
<p>And all that depends on hearing the tones.</p>
<p>Also, it sometimes seems like everyone in China is trying to learn English.</p>
<p>My friends’ blond D took Mandarin all through school, including HS & all of college, went to China to teach English to improve her Mandarin. She still finds it a very challenging language. I think it’s MUCH easier for them to learn English fluently than us to learn to read & translate their language, especially the writing. My neighbor is from Hong Kong and still speaks with a HK British accent. She is fluent in English, Mandarin, & Cantonese as she grew up tri-lingual.</p>
<p>It isn’t hard to speak better Mandarin than a good portion of China’s population, because since so many Chinese citizens speak Cantonese before learning Mandarin, their accent is very bad and very hard to understand to a normal Mandarin speaker. Very frequently you will find Cantonese speakers speaking broken Mandarin. </p>
<p>I find reading and writing to be easier than speaking, and then writing, but there’s hardly a difference. None of them pose too much of a difficulty…but I guess I’ve been around the language longer than a lot of students.</p>
<p>It is very possible to learn to speak and “write” Chinese without ever learning characters, because Pinyin fills in that gap between the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters. AFAIK, most Mandarin speakers can read Pinyin as well as they can characters, but it’s hardly - if ever - used besides in education.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s just me, but I’d encourage anyone interesting in learning an East Asian language to learn Chinese, and then move on to others if they’re interested, as learning Chinese strokes and tones sets a precedence for understanding these things in Korean, Japanese, other Chinese dialects, and other East Asian languages as well.</p>
<p>Justin,</p>
<p>Returning to your question / interest on the marketability of south asian languages ( hindi ). First recognize that the vast majority of Northern Indian languages are Indo-European in origin with most of them being derived from Sanskrit. Persian is a close cousin of Sanskrit. Pashto is a combination of these I think ( you should conform). Lastly Hindi is spoken widely in the northern part of India and yes in Pakistan. In Pakistan it has morphed into Urdu ( or as they say in Pakistan it has morphed into Hindi in India). But if you learn Hindi - Urdu is a piece of cake. </p>
<p>So if you study Hindi with some emphasis on Sanskrit or Persian, you could find your marketability vastly increasing.</p>
<p>Hope that helps</p>
<p>xMastemah - As a heritage speaker of Mandarin, I am “literate” in pinyin, but it is not accepted as a form of writing in any real-life context. Most Chinese people regard it as a crutch.</p>