<p>Which industries, fields, jobs in business/finance make good comunication skills and multilingualism (I'm currently fluent at 5 languages and I'm studying more) as important properties for career and pay advancement?</p>
<p>I mean: as far as I know, people working in I.B. don't communicate with anyone and all they need is patience and good math skills.</p>
<p>But which jobs in this area do really pay you for your communication skills and languages?</p>
<p>i would be curious to know that too</p>
<p>anyone could help here?</p>
<p>You can make an absolute killing if you also happen to be good at sales. Salespeople are often the highest-paid folks in a business, and having the skills you have puts you a leg up with multi-national corporations. Even if you can't negotiate deals well, you'd be very valuable just as sales support (or translating) for the guys in suits.</p>
<p>just curious which languages are you fluent in and which are you currently studying?</p>
<p>Are people actually paid more for knowing a language? My impression was that it generally opened other positions in the company that would previously have been unavailable.</p>
<p>( Anyway, please note that I don't mean being necessarily a major in languages. Just being multilingual, e.g. Bachelor of Finance (or other social/business studies) and certified proficiency in other languages. )</p>
<p>I speak French, German, Italian, English, a minor South Asian language; I'm currently studying Chinese (Mandarin) and will initiate another language next year (probably I'm going to choose an East European one).</p>
<p>just wondering...how do you learn these languages? Currently I'm only fluent in Spanish, but I would like to learn more as well...</p>
<p>Mainly by travelling a lot, being exposed to the language itself and having the right attitude. As for myself: Being in Europe, I was more exposed to the languages I mentioned since I was a baby (colleagues and friends of my parents, trying to learn from them and thereby growing the interest quite early). But I guess that also the U.S. gives you a wide exposure to so many other languages.</p>
<p>Taking courses and doing a few exchanges abroad during school might not be enough to gain fluency. Many of my friends had the highest scores at school but never used the language practically.
You must come to a stage that will enable you to think in that language. One thing I don't like is the fact that people call them "foreign languages". It's already too political and creates alienation towards the language. I have never had that attitude, but I think most of my friends who had it never "entered" the language properly.</p>
<p>I also noticed a great difference between some types of people learning the languages.
People who learn the language out of spontaneous curiosity (and thereby more naturally tend to be interested in the country's literature, popular culture and life) learn the language immediately.
But there are also people who learn the language with a "secondary intention" e.g. with the primary objective of making business or doing politics.
They are capable of grasping the language and be very good students, but often require lot of effort to "switch from one language to another". And they, too, usually create a great spiritual gap between "mothertongue" and "foreign languages".
Politicians/politically-minded people... well their attitude often depends on their ideology. Starting to learn "the language of those b******" is usually not an open-minded start :)
Obviously this is only how I personally perceived the difficulties encountered by people around me. Maybe it's different elsewhere.</p>
<p>But the main idea is to live the language.</p>
<p>Do what you like in the language you want to study. Your daily routines.
e.g. if you like a certain type of literature very much (horror, sci-fi, etc.) then read that in the language you want.
Same for videogames, tv programmes, music and other hobbies.
I watched cartoons in three languages when I was a kid.</p>
<p>If you have any questions regarding a specific language then ask me. :)</p>
<p>How long did it take you to gain your fluencies? Which language do you think you have the best grasp on? Whcih E. European language are you thinking about starting? Russian perhaps? Or another? </p>
<p>Btw, people like you that speak so many languages are mini heroes to me because when I "grow up" I want to be able to speak a bunch of languages fluently. </p>
<p>I am more partial to the Romance languages and am studying French and Italian now. I also studied Hungarian, which was fun and I would have loved to go to Hungary but haven't gotten the chance thus far. I have gone to Italy and France though so that was great to get the practice. I too am interested in working abroad.</p>
<p>My previous wife (who was Brazilian) was fluent at five languages--Portuguese (native), Spanish, English, Italian, and French. She learned them primarily through travelling, and used them both for business (she ran her family's business for them--which did about $5 million/year in sales back in the 1980s), and for her own interests (she volunteered as a translator for the LA Olympics in 1984 just because she wanted to meet all the athletes and do her part to help out). </p>
<p>I agree with alero86 that learning a language out of intellectural curiosity is much easier than learning one for business. My ex-wife always told me that Italian was the "toughest" for her to pursue learning, because it was the only one she "had" to learn for the business--while she already knew the others from her previous travels. She did, however, believe that English was extremely difficult to learn because of all the idioms we use that are not really clear or easily translatable.</p>
<p>bonafide20, Where are you from and which cities did you visit in Italy?
I started learning the first three almost contemporarily, the latter when I was about 13 (now I'm 19). To be honest, I don't think I'm better at one specific language (among the 5 I'm already fluent at).
I may, however, have a wider cultural understanding depending on how long I lived in which places and which spheres I was exposed to. Try also visiting different places of the same country for a while and you will subconsciously switch to the regional dialect depending on whom you're speaking to :)</p>
<p>Calcruzer, interesting story :)
Yeah, that's also my main fear. Although I am very interested in a variety of Eastern European languages, also my once young and innocent mentality (lol) is showing slightly utilitarian and pragmatic rather than instinctive traits; "Which language would be better for business, more 'useful'?" is the typical counter-question...
I'm doing my best to let the business come later, and use only the languages I already know well in my future job :)</p>
<p>Anyway, I'm thinking about Czech, Russian... or maybe even Turkish.
I'm equally interested in them. However, I'd also like to go somewhere "new". Russian and Czech culture don't seem to differ much from typical european literature/philosophy/art that I've already tackled "most of my life" (Nabokov, Tolstjoy, Stanislaw Lem, Kafka...).
But I like the crashing, cracking, zishing sound in Russian... and cyrillic has something "science fiction/futuristic" in it :P But that's just my exotic perception.
Any advice?</p>
<p>Another thing I thought of.
Maybe different languages also have different industry specializations, right?
e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korean = high technology
etc.</p>
<p>as far as I know, chinese has two types, one is Mandarin, used in mainland china=low tech-level manufacture
Cantonese, used in Hongkong and surrounding area=trading trasporting& fanancial market</p>
<p>btw, mind that usually if you passed age of 17 or 18, learning how to SPEAK a language will be significantly harder than younger people.
and Japanese,Chinese, Korean are, in my opinion, a lot harder than european languages to learn.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Cantonese, used in Hongkong and surrounding area=trading trasporting& fanancial market
[/quote]
</p>
<p>the finance shops in HK are going to start scaling back soon</p>
<p>dcfca, you are so right. Actually it started already. still, one of the leading industries is finance, but the size of the market is alot smaller and declining fast</p>