What Language Should I Learn?

[malicious_bloke]

German, Russian AND Japanese.

In addition to english, it basically means you can play an extra in literally ANY film/documentary in ww2

 

[The Felonius Pope]

It comes down to either German or Japanese IMO. I however base this totally on my own interests and biases. Living in Germany with some fluency in German sounds appealing to me. So does Japan, but not to the same extent, though I thoroughly enjoy the technology they produce. Some of that tech would be easier to acquire if I knew Japanese.

Thanks for the feedback, Televator. Congrats on reaching 1,000 posts, by the way.

 

[televator]

It comes down to either German or Japanese IMO. I however base this totally on my own interests and biases. Living in Germany with some fluency in German sounds appealing to me. So does Japan, but not to the same extent, though I thoroughly enjoy the technology they produce. Some of that tech would be easier to acquire if I knew Japanese.

Thanks for the feedback, Televator. Congrats on reaching 1,000 posts, by the way.

NP, and 90% of the credit for my post count should go to creatards and libertarians. Next benchmark is 1337.

 

[Visaki]

Except don't you guys have some insane number of cases? That might be a tad tricky.

Insane? I mean it's only 15... and the 4 tenses.

 

[The Felonius Pope]

Insane? I mean it's only 15... and the 4 tenses.

Good lord... I hate cases!

 

[Visaki]

Good lord... I hate cases!

Think of it in a positive way: If you learn finnish every other language in the world will feel easy. Learning finnish might take a few decades though.

 

[Dean]

The Felonius Pope

I am learning a new language next year, and I figured I would get some other people's opinions on the matter. What should I learn: Russian, German, or Japanese?

Difficult. Since I know all three of those languages , though admittedly, I know German and Russian a LOT better than I know Japanese , I personally would go with German.

German:
Regardless of whether or not you ever choose to visit Germany, Germanic languages are probably the most widely spoken languages in the world, English top among them, and because of that , as WarK noted, sorta , it is one of the easiest languages for native-English speakers to learn. It is true that Germans are generally bilingual, as Rex said, and I have yet to meet a German person who isn't. But still, I am sure it will be of at least some help at one point or another, especially in industrial jobs, where German is rather widely spoken alternately to English, etc. I should add that this observation only comes from my own experience. Then again, Danish is also a Germanic language, and notoriously difficult to learn for most English people, so I would imagine that experience of these languages (when in use) will differ from person to person. Of course, I'm rather interested in languages, and I have noted that there seems to be equal problems for German people learning English, and English speakers learning German, etc. I.e. selecting the right articles, ein, eine, einer, etc. For example, their Sun is Female, where their Moon is Male. Other than a few other minor intricacies, such as the fact that nouns in German begin in upper-case.

You can also see this in English, to a somewhat lesser extent, and French on the other hand is rather diametrically opposite, e.g. no nouns in French begin in upper-case as far as I know. I know some people from my school who know German, but also picked up French and / or Latin at some point along the way, it just seems rather a logical transition.

But German is actually reasonably logical and straight, as is Austrian and Swiss variety of German (*hugs Inferno*). The areas where people have problems is with flection and picking the right articles (as I said), as those things have often developed historically and "are just the way they are". There is no rule. English at some point simplified the Germanic tradition so you have no sense of female, male and "things" articles anymore. You also lost the difference between "thou" and "thee". This is all still there in German.

Thee and Thou are called "Sie" and "Du" in German. You see the close connection there. They are basically two forms that both mean "You". "Du" is used when you know someone rather well, if you are younger (not yet adult), among friends and family of course. If both people are adult, they can only use "Du" if the older one suggests it. Then both participants can use it. Otherwise it is considered impolite. But of course, it depends on the people or even Business, how formal and respectful they appear and how important it might be for them to understand. It is more casual in media and younger Industries, and "Du" is standard among colleagues and co-workers, etc. "Sie" comes from treating adults and people in high ranking places with respect and is paired with what is "Mrs." and "Mr." in English, in German "Frau" (literally Lady or Woman) and "Herr" (Lord), but it hasn't that pompous meaning that "Lord" may have to some folk out there (myself included) ... pronunciation of words and vowel sounds in German is sometimes very similar to English and sometimes very different, but suffice to say; you'll get used to it.

Russian:
Russian is not exactly a very widely spoken language, and it is not Germanic. It is a Slavic language, like Polish is. But it has lost a great, great deal of semblance to its Germanic cousins, such as English or German. They have an organized alphabet of letters, but nevertheless , Russian is very complex and knotty to grasp, especially for most English speakers. For starters, most of the characters are the same, and they don't use Greek alphabet as far as I am aware, or borrow characters from other languages, but they do sometimes invert letters from the English and other Germanic (Western & Northern European) alphabets, and appear to have instigated some nifty tricks with them, such as this character: 'я' Look familiar? I too have a bias on this topic, towards the Germanic segment of languages, but I don't know, and I'll leave it to you of course. Russian is not spoken very widely, as I said, or written for that matter, since the predominant world language these days is English. But it proves useful of course when talking to Russian people. Many Russian people are bilingual or trilingual too, but there are not as many bilingual people as there are in e.g. Denmark or Germany, the Netherlands, etc. So if you ever visit Russia, it will prove helpful at least, methinks.

One of the areas that may throw you off immediately is the fact that no definite articles exist in Russian, e.g. there is no word for 'the', and the same is true of most if not all Slavic and West Slavic languages, such as WarK's native language, Polish. In Polish, there are no articles either, and it was kinda interesting when he described to me in the chatroom what it was like for him when he first saw 'the'. It's something that we're just so accustomed to in English, and other Germanic languages, that we don't even think about it. But as WarK said to me, it's a word, and it's a word with little or no actual meaning. A word that we could conceivably do without, and it would make things simpler anyways. But sometimes in Russian or in Polish, or Slavic languages in general, the articles have to be replace with other phrases, or just ignored altogether, which is usually very difficult for English people to get the hang of. But I won't need to discuss that as I did with German, since there are no articles, just as with Polish.

Also, like Polish (this seems to be quite pervasive among the Slavic family of languages), Russian does not have as many grammatical tenses as English, or any other Germanic language for that matter. For example, neither Russian nor Polish bother with the difference between "I was shopping", and "I had been shopping", and so forth. There are usually only 3 grammatical tenses in Slavic, and (no offense intended to WarK), the languages of Slavic, such as Russian,may in fact be considered rather primitive in their structure compared to most other European languages, that have sometimes over a dozen grammatical tenses (as in English) and highly complex systems of articles, e.g. 'a', 'an', & 'the' among them. But this of course is a purely subjective valuation. I know Russian, as I do German, but for the reasons I listed above , and more , it's very difficult to use. I read slow, (sometimes, though still somewhat rarely) slip up in my grammar when writing, and have little fluent command of higher order speech. Pronunciation and Grammar is actually pretty easy, for me anyways, but if you choose to learn Russian, I guess you'll find that yourself... heh.

Whoa ... really long reply already ...

Japanese:
Japanese is really only spoken as a first or second language for that matter, by a rather small group of people. Really only Japanese people living in Japan speak it as their first language, it is a subset of East Asian languages, has no Alphabet (as such) , albeit the characters can be translated into alphabetical ones phonetically in text , and it uses no articles, the same as all (West) Slavic languages, such as Polish, and Russian, as I dealt with it earlier. It is even more complex than any of the Indo-European languages, be it Slavic, Germanic, or otherwise, because there are far more characters to learn than the 26 that we use in most European countries, although I couldn't tell you exactly how many there are. It is a very, very, dense and complicated language, despite it's noted dissimilarity to Germanic's complex systems of articles and grammatical tenses. It's actually quite a poetic language if you can get to use it fluently, although this is close to impossible for most Europeans. I only know some, but I can barely get by in conversation. Enough to write. Enough to write some Limerick and Haiku poetry, but that's about as far as it extends, and mostly forgotten.

I'm not too certain about the demographics of the number of people worldwide who know these languages. Both China and Japan are Asian countries and have extremely large populations and cities, some of the largest known in the world in fact, coupled with their (to us in the West) bizarre languages. So if we were to go based simply on numbers, then I suppose one might say that Chinese is the dominant language of the world, since it has over 1 billion native-speakers in its own country alone! At least!. But Japanese character organizations can be transcribed into European ones phonetically, and can be learned in this way, and most of the difficulty with learning the language will be with the fact that , like Russian and so on , it lacks a system of articles, has a somewhat simplified grammar system, e.g. compared to some other Asian languages, and tends to be very centric on pronunciation of certain vowels and vowel sounds. So the first thing you should do IF you choose to learn Japanese is grasping the vowel symbols in the language, paying careful attention to the way the symbols are drawn, and other general ins and outs.

Personally, I found that my Japanese skills were improved by writing some Haiku, and other strictly rhythmic forms of poetry in general, because it adds your creative mind to get to work on the problem, and absorb some of the different vowel sounds and symbols, like I said, and gradually, build up your pronunciation and so forth to the point where you can write it. Basic skills in a language like Japanese are really all you need, and it's very difficult to learn in comparison to the other two languages, especially the Germanic one. But speaking in Japanese also requires considerable variability in pitch and tone to articulate certain things, and people often make similar comments about Korean languages, and Chinese. So this isn't really surprising, when they're in much the same family of languages. Other than that, you might just want to learn to read and write in Japanese, rather than speak it, if it becomes a little too tasking, as it sometimes does once you've practiced it for any considerable length of time, methinks.

TL;DR
Russian and Japanese are rather clichéd, and potentially very difficult. Plus they are not very widely known in the general population, especially in European countries. Only learn Asian languages if you genuinely feel you will need it for a practical use, given it's extreme complications, and lack of a solid alphabet, e.g. all the characters are somewhat strange, and it may become difficult to remember them all sequentially, if you haven't learned them since childhood, e.g. this is why I didn't progress in Japanese further than writing some limerickesque rhymes. Polish and Russian I managed to pull off, and you may too. But German is more widely spoken, and easier to learn, and adopt higher order forms of speech, so all in all, Go for German!

 

[The Felonius Pope]

Wow...Thank you Dean! Your reply was extremely helpful and highlighted many of things I have been considering. I am

leaning towards learning either Japanese or German because of practicality (ie a business setting.) However, I do

have a bit of a problem with Asian languages. Some of my foreign friends have tried to teach me Thia, Lao, and

Vietnamese, and I always have a problem with the pitch of the words.

Even if do I decide between German and Japanese, I will still have a part of me begging to learn Russian. You see, I plan

on travelling to Russia and photographing the country. From what my eye doctor tells me (he is a Soviet immigrant), not

many people there speak English, even less with fluency, and knowing the language would be extremely useful. I also

think it would be cool to read Dostoevsky in his native tongue.

On a related note, I was wondering: are there any decent welding or chemical industry jobs in primarily-German-

speaking countries?

 

[Dean]

["¦] I also think it would be cool to read Dostoevsky in his native tongue. ["¦]

Thanks for the welcoming response. And I don't mean to be snobby, but ... good god, man. If you do choose to learn Russian as a foreign language, it's going to take many years to be able to wield with any fluency. So I guess it depends on when you're planning to go to Russia (and further still), when you're planning to read F. M. Dostoyevsky. I have read Dostoevsky's stuff in English somewhere I think, and I've read Tolstoy in Russian. I still haven't gotten around to reading War and Peace (all 1225 pages of it or so) in its original language. I plan to do that at some point, provided that it's possible.

["¦] On a related note, I was wondering: are there any decent welding or chemical industry jobs in primarily-German-speaking countries?

From what I've been told, yes. German is quite widely spoken in chemistry and (e.g. aerospace) engineering industry jobs. And it's spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg (at least to some degree) as an official language. You might want to give Austria a look. But I should warn you, the Austrians and Swiss technically speak the most 'modern' Germanic languages, and Austrian German is quite noticeably different to regular German, as Inferno can probably testify to. And it's much more than just a dialect, e.g. this is obviously because German is a pluricentric language, and it has many standard versions.

 

[Inferno]

From what I've been told, yes. German is quite widely spoken in chemistry and (e.g. aerospace) engineering industry jobs. And it's spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg (at least to some degree) as an official language. You might want to give Austria a look. But I should warn you, the Austrians and Swiss technically speak the most 'modern' Germanic languages, and Austrian German is quite noticeably different to regular German, as Inferno can probably testify to. And it's much more than just a dialect, e.g. this is obviously because German is a pluricentric language, and it has many standard versions.

True dat. Being able to speak and understand German is one thing, being able to speak and understand Austrian is very different. It's like Scottish English and London English really. You might make yourself understood but there might still be significant comprehension difficulties.

 

[WarK]

​

 

[The Felonius Pope]

No snobbiness detected Dean. Once again, thanks for the information. It doesn't seem as though I'll be traveling to Russia anytime soon; I can't even afford the dslr I've been looking into.