<p>Im majoring in international relations and economics (and want to go into management consulting after law school), and was wondering if studying 4 years of Italian undergrad is a complete waste of time?</p>
<p>It's between Italian and Spanish because Portuguese isnt offered this year though my other question is, would Portuguese be a strategic language to learn for the business/consulting world?</p>
<p>I'm looking for a language to set me apart from others and not be too hard to learn given my decent background in Spanish from HS.</p>
<p>Setting you apart? Oh man. I was going to suggest Mandarin Chinese =(</p>
<p>Learn a language if you are truly passionate about it. Italian is cool though. Learning a language is never a waste of time (well, in my opinion 
)</p>
<p>my parents told me mandarin but thats wayyy too hard to ever be fluent by end of undergrad (im doing my study abroad in england so i wouldnt have chance to do it in china)</p>
<p>If you have a decent grasp of spanish, italian will be a breeze. The rules are essentially the same for all romance languages, but obviously different words.</p>
<p>I took italian last semester, with 5 years of French background. I absolutely loved it, and it was easy to study.</p>
<p>I’m doing it with japanese. Its one of my passions i planned on learning.</p>
<p>Yea Italian is pretty nice. I took it this past year and it was fun. Pretty easy to learn to if you know Spanish or French (since Italian is similar to those languages). I took Spanish in high school, so I breezed through Italian. Also, it may make it easier to get jobs in cities like Pittsburgh or New York (both have decent sized Italian populations), and companies that do business with Italy will want someone who speaks Italian</p>
<p>so would it be beneficial for management consulting to be fluent in spanish or italian?</p>
<p>i feel like there are 1537239 people who are fluent in spanish</p>