Which language is more "sought after"? Russian vs. Mandarin vs. Japanese vs. Arabic

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>Arabic.</p>

<p>But in general, it all depends. If you want an opportunity to work with the government like FBI, then I would guess it’s Arabic. If it’s DEA, then Spanish definitely[Mexican cartels]. If it’s just for Military purposes, then again I think it’s Arabic.</p>

<p>But that’s not easy at all. Arabic and Russian are hard as hell.</p>

<p>If I could learn any languages other than the one’s I already know English and Spanish. I would learn German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. But mostly just German and French.</p>

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<p>I myself is a multilingual in Mandarin, English, Portuguese and Spanish with Cantonese as my first language.</p>

<p>There is no such thing as regretting to know more or wasting time learning, you will only knowing less. </p>

<p>When it comes to learning a language, you should try to analysis which language gives you the opportunity to practice with a fluent-non native or native speaker. </p>

<p>Since we are living in the US, the most popular second language among American is Spanish, many jobs in America will require it employees to speak both english and spanish well, and business that chose not to serve a particular group of people will only lose business and will have a worsening relationship with them.</p>

<p>The chinese always said, “it does not matter whether what the buyer understand what the seller wants but a seller must understand the buyers, this way he can foster a positive relationship.”</p>

<p>Think about this, for example, one day, a chinese customer came to your place to buy a product and you speak his language and understand him and his culture from the inside and out. If i am that chinese person, I will definitely spread the news and recommend my friends and every chinese people i know to come and look for you to serve all of us. They will be so happy with your service that they are willing to give you more money because they like you more. Does that make sense ?</p>

<p>Ok, enough of this talk, the next most useful language will be Mandarin and Arabic. Japanese is good if you want to work mostly in Japan and Russian if you want to have a mail order bride :P.</p>

<p>From my experience, learning mandarin can set you on the path to learn other East Asian language Vietnamese, Cantonese, Japanese and even Korean, because Asian Language developed base on Han Chinese Character as China is always the centre of power in Asia. The only tough part about chinese is pronunciation, this can go away, once you know how to grasp the tone and stuff, the word order is quite similar to English and have no conjugation and verb, there is no alphabet to be learnt, so you can totally skip the alphabet stuff and go straight to memorizing chinese vocabulary and character. </p>

<p>So overall it is very easy to learn and not as difficult as many people make it out to be. Because these people have never bother to learn and understand Chinese.</p>

<p>My friend learn Korean and Japanese, so word order in japanese and korean are similar to each other but different from english. Sure, it is easy to pronounce but the grammar may not make sense to you and they do have an alphabet system and such.</p>

<p>So my best advice to you when it comes to learning a new langauge is this, learn to write first and learn one word a day, this way you will learn a lot faster. Do not worry about speaking and listening yet because you are not living in a country that is surrounding by native speaker of that particular langauge all the time. You still need someone to teach you how to speak and if you already know how to write by the time, you find someone to teach you how to speak, you pretty keep the whole process of learning the basic which can save you a lot of time and trouble</p>

<p>Get to know more native speaker of that langauge through skype and internet and try write to them in that language whenever you get the chance. </p>

<p>Do not sit there and think about it, just do it. I hope my advice can help.</p>

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<p>If you know Russian well, the CIA will recruit you. True story. But if you know Chinese, that’s more helpful in the business sense.</p>

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<p>SupremeJustice, </p>

<p>From where did you hear that?</p>

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<p>So, why is Russian even in this conversation? The Cold War is over, you guys.</p>

<p>I would say definitely Mandarin, or Spanish, which for some reason isn’t on your list. However, unless you do a lot of extra work (e.g. immersion trips over summers), I don’t think that 4 years of classes will make you fluent enough to conduct business in that language.</p>

<p>Do you plan to move to China/Japan/Russia when you graduate? If not, why do you think learning that language will be so useful for your career? If you are planning on staying in the States, the most useful language would be Spanish, I would think, considering the Hispanic population is one of the fastest-growing ones here.</p>

<p>Edit: did not realize this was a really old thread! But my points still stand.</p>

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<p>Depends on what you want to do. Mandarin Chinese is going to be most in demand in both the private and public sector - if you decide to work in international business, Chinese is going to be the word, but it will also be useful in government/public affairs. Arabic and Russian are more useful in the public sector. If you want to do military affairs, Arabic is the BEST choice for the present, although who knows where our foreign problems will be in 10 years. Russian is also a big security/military language right now.</p>

<p>Japanese will be more useful in business, but not necessarily government. Besides, a lot of people can speak Japanese - by which I mean it’s a more popular choice for college students and professionals than the other three.</p>

<p>I’ve taken Japanese and I think that it’s probably the easiest out of the four - yes, the characters are different and there aren’t any cognates, but the sentence structure is the simplest and the sounds are easy to make. It’s also not much of a tonal language, so your inflection won’t necessarily affect meanings THAT much. Chinese is a tonal language so the way you say things, even if you pronounce them correctly, will affect your meaning. I think that one and Arabic are probably the most difficult to learn. Russian is somewhere in the middle.</p>

<p>You may also want to consider Korean.</p>

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<p>OP,</p>

<p>Of the languages that you listed, I would rank them in this order of current demand:</p>

<p>Mandarin</p>

<p>Arabic</p>

<p>Japanese</p>

<p>Russian</p>

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<p>What’s “sought after” depends not only on demand but also on supply. I suspect that there are many more mandarin speakers now than speakers of any of the other three languages you mention, at least on the West Coast, and probably many fewer arabic speakers. That said, China is significantly more important to the global economy than any arab nation or Russia or even Japan. </p>

<p>OTOH, Russian seems to have gone out of fashion, so I would not be surprised if there’s a deficit of Russian speakers in another decade or so. While Japan is declining in influence and presumably less attractive to students now, there remains a large backlog of mid-career people who studied/mastered Japanese back in the late 1980s/1990s when everyone thought Japan would take over the world, so Japan’s supply-demand equation probably is not in your favor. (So much for trying to guess which country will dominate the future…)</p>

<p>Bottom line, you should go with your passion. The countries you mention are vastly different from each other, in fact have almost nothing in common, so you’re best off figuring out which one is most attractive to you and sticking with that, regardless of market trends.</p>