German or Russian?!

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Reply 40

VanillaCat

MTKfrench

I really like the sounds of the Spanish language, and I enjoy French so another romance language would be a good choice for me. I also love Spain :biggrin:

Nice

I just wondered how you would do your PS, if you had loads of Spanish choices, and then suddenly a Russian choice.

Reply 41

MTKfrench

VanillaCat

Nice

I just wondered how you would do your PS, if you had loads of Spanish choices, and then suddenly a Russian choice.

Don't worry, I considered it when writing it. It could work for pretty much any language with French I think. :biggrin:

Reply 42

Anatheme

pawel1

Is it really? How long it took you to learn it?

I was quite happy that I can read it so fast :smile:

Never mind, though, I knew going to uni for comp. sys. was good choice :yep:

It took me a week (two lessons) to learn the Greek alphabet, and half a week for the Cyrillic one because the Greek one is very similar.

Reply 43

pawel1

Anatheme

It took me a week (two lessons) to learn the Greek alphabet, and half a week for the Cyrillic one because the Greek one is very similar.

Alphabet is just half of the success. Reading it like from a book is harder.
But Greek?! In 2 lessons? Well done! :smile:

Reply 44

MTKfrench

pawel1

Alphabet is just half of the success. Reading it like from a book is harder.
But Greek?! In 2 lessons? Well done! :smile:

Alphabets aren't hard, if you work on them you can get it done in a day, two days max. I did Hiragana in a day and a half.

Reply 45

Fillette

Rooskii for the win :yy:

Reply 46

TheFoxBlip

There are more opportunities for graduates who can speak german than Russian, about 3:1 ratio in favour of German. In addition, Russia is rather inaccessible compared to German speaking countries so in terms of usefulness, German is quite comfortably the winner.

Reply 47

Zadory

So what do you think about Italian then? I was accepted for German and wanted to transfer to German and Russian but SSEES says they are full already :frown:

... The tutor I talked to at the Italian department however thinks that i could do Geman and italian.. it's a nice language, interesting country, I would not mind diving into it at all, but honestly, employability-wise it doesn't really compare to Russian, does it?

Reply 48

seifip

Unless you already know another Slavic language, Russian will be much more difficult than German. Russian is generally classified among the most difficult languages in the world.

Anyway... I think that you should learn Russian. Pretty much everyone in Germany speaks English. There are even jokes about the fact that when German people exit an international conference, they continue talking among themselves in English, whereas most other people would switch to their mother tongue. In Russia, on the other hand, there's a big percentage of the population that doesn't speak English, or at least not very good. Also, by learning Russian, you'll get access to an immense number of various cultural and scientific works both online and offline, many of which aren't translated into English.

Reply 49

xmarilynx

seifip

So? That's a pretty ignorant thing to say. I agree that in general their level of English is impressive (I even mistook a couple for native speakers), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make an effort to learn their language and about their culture. Germany is an amazing country, their literature (and more importantly, beer) are amongst the best in the world, and their scientific advances works easily compete with Russia's. And even if they can speak English, they won't always - if you're in an all German work place or friendship group, for example. German is definitely well worth learning: it's one of the three working languages of the EU, Germany is the largest European economy and the UK's second largest global market and its largest European export market. It's probably also worth pointing out that it's not just the Germans that speak German either. I'm not trying to say it's superior to Russian, however, because I personally couldn't pick and want to study both.

And also, guys this thread is old :p: