<p>I'm waiting until I take some introductory classes to choose a major, but I know that my major will be in a technology or lab science field, as I want to be a scientist, engineer, or maybe a programmer.</p>
<p>One thing I really want to do is learn a foreign language. I don't speak anything other than English and have never taken a foreign language in school, and I want to start taking a foreign language my first semester at my community college, and stay with it until I graduate from a university.</p>
<p>Being from California, Spanish makes quite a bit of sense, but Chinese, Japanese, and German are also offered, and, with these countries having quite a bit of technological and scientific progress going on, I wonder how useful they would be to my desired fields of study. Also, how much harder a I would it be to learn an Asian language as opposed to a European language?</p>
<p>Asian languages are much much harder than European, unless you plan to devote a lot of time and energy to master them you should stick with a Euro language.</p>
<p>Spanish or Chinese are two of top spoken languages in the world. But choose a language your passionate about and are not just learning it to get by. Whats your heritage to? Maybe you would want to learn a language associated with that?</p>
<p>Chinese is one pain in the butt. Japanese is a little easier, grammatically, but they have so many different alphabets and characters it’s insanity (their characters are in the thousands). They have their own, and the Chinese ones. I literally cannot express the difficulty of Chinese. You have to dedicate a TON more time to it (more than European languages for an English native speakers, that’s for sure) and are you sure you want to do that on top of your other studies?</p>
<p>Chinese is the most useful one, economically. You will also find that Chinese is practically in every other Asian language because of how strong their influence is. Roughly half of Japanese is stuff borrowed from the Chinese languages. If you don’t want to dedicate the time, take Spanish. But if you do, take Chinese.</p>
<p>I actually disagree about Chinese Mandarin being useful. Sure it’s the most spoken, but the vast majority of people who live in China are not going to have that many opportunities. Also, many of the more educated classes are learning English. I recommend Spanish wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think it comes down to what I’ll enjoy, for the simple reason that English is THE language of science and engineering, and pretty much the whole community can speak it. A foreign language isn’t at all important to my major, and it generally isn’t looked for.</p>
<p>What I’d enjoy most is German. It’s really hard to articulate why. Some things are just more enjoyable than others, I guess.</p>
<p>Learning a language can be a great adventure, particularly if you live there for a year. </p>
<p>In my opinion, you should take the language of the country that you most want to visit and perhaps live in. Choosing a language because it “makes sense” for career sons is questionable, partly because what you imagine and what is really there can be very different.</p>
<p>I have studied and lived in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. At the time I was in Japan (1990) everyone was still thinking that it would take over the world economically and culturally. I had studied it a year before I went - it was much harder than European languages because it is so different - and when I got there I realized I didn’t like the culture and, even worse, that everything I thought about the place was wrong. On the other hand, I loved the EUropean countries, so continued to learn the languages with enjoyment. </p>
<p>If you have a feeling for German (a less agreeable place to live than France or Italy in my experience), you should trust it.</p>