Which 2 languages would be most useful to learn at uni?

I'm a native Arabic speaker and I started learning Spanish last year, and I found many similarities, such as sentence structures.
In fact, our teacher would encourage us to think of how we would say a sentence in Arabic and then translate it into Spanish, because of the grammar similarities.

I don't think you can look at someone's language proficiency in such a black and white way as being either "fluent" or "not fluent".

You can start to really use the language you're learning well before you're actually fluent in it! Like I said earlier, many of my friends have already started using Chinese in professional environments, and we haven't even graduated yet. This may not be the case for easier languages, because there are so many people already fluent in them; but for the more difficult languages, the pool of people is much smaller, and there really are very few people with "good" Chinese, let alone fluent. Also, as Anatheme said above, most people are aware that it takes much more than a degree to become fluent in some languages.

Not really, no… (unless you're talking about dialectal, in which case maybe, but MSA, definitely not.)

And Chinese won't benefit you as much as Russian because in 8 years of Chinese you'd just be able to read a newspaper whereas you could be fluent in Russian. Honestly, don't underestimate Russia in terms of business.

You really shouldn't say that to someone, because you can't possibly know and it might dissuade them from learning a language they're really passionate about

The UN is laking French and Russian speaking interpreters quite badly, from what I've been told at a career fair.

And also, when you learn a language you get used to the structure and grammar, and since you've learnt many Romance languages, I'm guessing it's a lot easier for you to learn those languages as opposed to semitic languages, for example. And also because Romanc languages are pretty straightforward and that learning one will ease your learning of the others?



If you consider a career in Foreign Affairs/diplomacy, you need French, and will have troubles not having it, not matter how easy it is. French and Spanish are always useful languages to have, but if you can learn it without doing your degree in it, it could be better.

Anatheme,

It doesn't surprise me that you heard the "8 years just to read a newspaper" line from a Chinese teacher. Many Chinese people underestimate Westerners' abilities to learn their language. This is partly because Chinese is simply very difficult, but is also based on the mistaken notion that Chinese can only be learned by Chinese people. I remember when I told some of my Chinese friends I would start to learn Mandarin at uni, and feeling pretty gutted when they quite bluntly said they didn't think I'd ever manage to learn it. Now, after only a few years of study, it's easier to communicate with them in Chinese rather than English (they go to university in England too, so their English is by no means shabby).

Surprisingly, this sort of view is also adopted by many Chinese teachers. I remember meeting an American guy in Beijing who'd won a scholarship to study in China. His teachers in America said that they wouldn't teach him any characters because they would never be able to learn them properly, and as a result he had to start learning them from scratch in Beijing, only starting during his 3rd year of study! Now, there is a good point to be made that the time spent on learning thousands of characters could be better spent on improving your speaking and listening; but, ultimately, if you are going to try and get fluent, becoming literate is a very important step. In fact, how one would even learn Chinese past the very elementary stage without learning how to read is beyond me.

I wonder whether this sort of mindset exists for other languages too?

Lastly, I can only restate my earlier point that I don't think language proficiency should be viewed as either 'fluent' or 'not fluent'; it should instead be viewed on a (never-ending?) scale with 'haven't learned anything' on the left and either 'fluent' or 'native-like' on the right, depending on what one's goals are. I think it's perfectly possible to graduate with a high proficiency but not yet be fluent, and I know of many people who've gone on to use their 'difficult' languages in a professional way after graduation.

That said, I definitely agree that people need to be aware what they're getting into. In my experience, though, the time when most people are likely to give up is right at the start, rather than after a few years when they realise fluency is a long way off.

Aye, we're being told that a lot of them are coming up for retirement in the next few years.

Spanish is easy. That is, if you compare it to stuff like Mandarin, Russian, Arabic. If you tell me it's harder than Japanese, I really won't believe you . And tbh, it's easier than French, might be harder than Italian, not sure, but that's about it.

It might be easier but it's not easy lol.

Yeah, that's what I said… (Hence the comparison with languages seen as "hard" ). Although I don't think it's very high in the Difficult Languages to Learn For English Native Speakers League Table.

If it is that easy, why aren't more people brilliant at it? I think it's an easy language to pick up but not to master. Would you say English was an easy language for speakers of Romance languages? I wouldn't. Most people can speak it and be understood, but very few ever get really good at it. As an ESL teacher, I think English is deceptively easy. I get students in pre-intermediate saying English is easy, but they only think that because they're blissfully ignorant of how much there is still to learn. I think Spanish is like that, although perhaps not to the same degree. The majority of people I've met who claimed that Spanish was easy were pretty bad at it. If you were arrogant enough to claim a language was easy, wouldn't you make sure you knew that 'seguir' is not followed by the infinitive or that 'problema' is masculine? If it's so easy, why do people make these basic, basic mistakes? Nobody I know who is bilingual in Spanish/English says Spanish is easy.

'Cause you're the best, innit. Although, people aren't brilliant at French, nor at German, nor at any language at all, actually, so yeah, they may be **** at Spanish but they're **** at everything else as well, not just Spanish. No language is easy to master, but I'm sure as hell there are many, many harder languages to just learn (then master) than Spanish.

French and German don't seem to constantly get labelled as 'easy' languages the way Spanish does. Why not? How come people who speak them don't go around saying how easy they are and how anyone can learn them? I haven't found any significant difference in the level of difficulty. It goes without saying that Japanese or Arabic are harder for an English speaker to learn than Spanish, but why does Spanish suffer from the reputation that it's for idiots? French has more similar vocabulary to English than Spanish and German and Dutch are similar to English in many ways. Why are people impressed when I say I know German but not what I say I know Spanish?

Mandarin is still one the hardest languages to learn in the world for an English speaker and it definitely will take you ages to learn it (surely more than 4 years)

Maybe you could review your statement. It really depends who.
Mandarin is, at a glance, the hardest language to learn. This being said, it really depends. The difficulty in Chinese is in the writing system and in the sound system. There is no difficulty whatsoever in the grammar. It takes 3 months to get a good gist of the tones. One can be fluent without necessarily knowing how to write everything, though it helps obviously.
This taken into account, one could say Chinese isn't that hard.
I know of someone who learned Chinese in a year btw. He was so good in just one year that he skipped two years of a full undergrad Chinese degree (which normally takes 4 years). Sure, he works like a maniac, but in my opinion uni shouldn't only be about having fun. Far from that. But he's capable of reading a Chinese newspaper. And no he hasn't been studying it in secret for another 7 years.
My chinese friends mistook him for a Chinese actually when they heard him, and when they saw him write. Though his face immediately told them otherwise. Lol.
I'm not saying Chinese is easy, and I don't believe just anyone can do it. It'll take years for some, but it demands work and motivation that's for sure. But from experience, I can say that Chinese is by far not the hardest language. Attacking Japanese grammar, and Korean pronunciation is, trust me, far beyond any difficulty Chinese has ever brought me. Oh, and I dropped out of Latin, Maltese (grammatically based on Arabic) and Greek because I was just so bad at grammar, and forever would be.
Basically, it really depends on who we're talking about I believe. Don't make hasty judgements.

This thread has

a) Made me feel extremely stupid for learning Russian.
b) Motivated me to put Russian radio on and stop ******* about.
c) Made me feel a lot worse about how **** I am at inserting prepositions into empty spaces. Yeuch.

I will also say though:

a) That Anatheme, your English is really, really very good. Although I don't know how you speak in person your written facility is indistinguishable from full fluency, and your English is certainly much better than that of most native speakers. I rather pride myself on my ability to use English well as it's the only language I know, so to see someone evidently holding themselves to a much higher standard than me is a bit tbh. Yes on occasion you may drop the odd "foreign" turn of phrase or obscure mistake but it's hardly a capital crime.
b) I know I'm not going to be nearly as good at Russian when I finish university as someone else will be at a language they took from A Level. But I don't think that means that my degree will be useless to me in terms of actually being able to speak. I don't want to spend 4 years studying only to go off and get an office job as soon as I graduate and never use Russian again. I want to carry on learning after I graduate, to actually spend a sizeable portion of my life using this language that I am paying £30,000 to learn, to learn about the culture and the way of life of the people who use it, to get used to the sounds of the language and the way Russians think, to dream in Russian. Maybe I chose the wrong language, maybe I should have started learning something way earlier, maybe I'm past it. Maybe I'll never be fluent. But what else am I going to spend my life doing? You might as well do something and letting the high possibility of failure, letting your naivety get in the way I guess, would be far too timid. Like sticking your toe in the water but never going in.