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Portuguese vs Hindi practicality | ||
Tags: Hindi | Portuguese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 4001 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes  Speaks: Spanish | Message 17 of 31 28 February 2014 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
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If the OP really just wants a stable job that isn't too long for schooling, do engineering, nursing, or accounting. He'd get a stable, relatively well-paid job in MUCH less hours than the time it took him to get good at Hindi, Arabic, French, Portuguese, or whatever language combo you guys are talking about.
Learn languages mostly for fun, not to bring bacon home. If you must learn a language or languages, COMBINE it with something like the aforementioned careers. Or something stable, nothing like creative writing, art history, or psychology. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| knchcanada Newbie United States Joined 5110 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes | Message 18 of 31 28 February 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
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Alright, I have returned to the thread.
Actually, I do have a LOT of interest in Spanish, and have studied it extensively in High School. While I wouldn't call myself fluent or even proficient, I have a good vocabulary and understanding of the language's workings. Besides Hindi, I do hope to perfect my Spanish either in the summer or right after I graduate by living in LA for awhile, because I know Spanish will bring me significant enjoyment in life and in my career if I choose to stay in the states. I'm not opting to study it in University because I want to try something different and something that is pretty unique to the university - i.e. Hindi/Portuguese. For clarification, I am female.. if that makes any difference, and am not a native speaker in anything other than my native tongue (English). I am currently torn between going into IR after college or getting my PHd in Environmental Sociology. However, those are both very specific plans for a freshman in college. Things could change, but regardless I do want to learn multiple languages for my own personal development. As of now, the languages I hope to learn in the next 5 years are: Spanish Hindi/Urdu Portuguese ... in that order of importance. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 4001 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 19 of 31 28 February 2014 at 2:48pm | IP Logged |
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Well Spanish is obviously a great choice for an American that wants to practice a language in person. (without having to search too hard)
Keep in mind that you won't "perfect" your Spanish with just a summer or even a year living full time abroad. It still takes many thousands of hours to get a truly legitimate professional level. I was thinking about volunteering for an interpreter Spanish/English position at our hospital and am still not completely confident about doing it even with 6,500 hours devoted to the language in my life. (that's equivalent to two years living abroad, nine daily hours practicing the language) Also remember that you may be have to go up against fully bilingual people so you'll obviously need a lot of work to even sniff their level. At the risk of sounding like your parents, make sure that you get really, really high grades. I had to take extra classes after graduating college to boost my GPA for medical school applications because I got too many B's in science classes. Grades matter for almost all grad schools. Don't let languages mess up your grades. You CAN do both, enjoy languages and get good grades in your major. But really focus on doing well in school since it should be your priority and not just learning languages. Now if you major in something like bio AND Spanish, then your language learning is already built into your normal school work. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4373 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 20 of 31 28 February 2014 at 3:59pm | IP Logged |
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In the current state in the US, I think really most fields you go into you're going to be fighting an uphill battle to get hired and find a decent salary--I know people who graduated with Pharmacy and nursing degrees almost three years ago who still haven't found full-time work, and those of us who got law degrees are even worse. Liberal arts degrees in general are going to be challenging, but you can't necessarily help where your interests and strengths lie (personally I'm not mathematically talented enough to handle the often recommended STEM or medical fields).
If you're an incoming freshman, there's a lot of time to decide what you want to do in college, and even more time to decide what to do after college. Between the two languages, I don't know that one is particularly more advantageous than the other. I looked at the Hindi program and it looks like a very interesting program which would leave you with a good knowledge of the language. For whatever it's worth, I didn't intend on using my language skills when I graduated (everyone told me German was a useless language in the US) but I did manage to start using the language for work. It might take more creativity, but either language could be advantageous to your career. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| linguaholic_ch Triglot Groupie IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5052 days ago 69 posts - 96 votes Speaks: English, Hindi, Bengali Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, French | Message 21 of 31 28 February 2014 at 5:17pm | IP Logged |
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since you said that the university offers a better Hindi course along with the author TY Hindi himself, I would say go for it. I am a Hindi speaker myself and find it no problem understanding Urdu. Be sure to know both the Sanskrit and Urdu words together for the common words.
Portuguese can be learnt after you do this. Anyways it depends upon which country you prefer. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 4001 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 22 of 31 28 February 2014 at 5:24pm | IP Logged |
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It depends.
1. Graduate from a tier 1 or 2 law school→good job prospects Graduate from a lower tier one→struggle. 2. I highly doubt what you are saying about pharm graduates UNLESS they only want to work in certain high-demand states. 3. But the big thing is to combine languages with something, anything. If you just know a bunch of languages but have no other employable skills (or skills enabling you to start a business) then why would somebody give you bags of money? At the local language club that I go to occasionally there is an American who is a strong B2 in Spanish, native English, and probably the same B2 in French. And he always talks about how multilingual people should make more money or be more desired for jobs. Ok... ...if I'm a CEO of a big company and need to translate documents from English to Spanish/French/whatever, am I going to hire somebody that has intermediate-level skill of several languages or just hire somebody that is a C2/native speaker to translate from English to Spanish? Then hire another person to do English to French and so on? The only way the multilingual intermediate speaker would win out is if they offered really low rates to do the job or offered to translate more languages for the same price as one. Correct me if I'm wrong translators, but I believe that professional translaters only work in about three languages max and usually only translate from their foreign language INTO their native language(s). Granted, companies may not care that much about the quality of translation work, judging from the very shoddy users manuals guides I've read in Spanish. :( And these are big companies like DELL or IBM or GE. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 23 of 31 28 February 2014 at 5:36pm | IP Logged |
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Apart from the advice above on high grades, I suggest strongly that you start networking and looking for volunteer opportunities to get acquainted with the practical aspects of what you want to do. You'll have to balance your academics with "serious" extracurriculars - party just enough to keep some semblance of a social life but don't fall in the trap of letting it get more priority than the first two items.
I've seen even undergrads of business or the hard sciences having a hell of a time landing a job that offers a reasonable shot at advancement and professional development. I've also seen more than a few people with arts degrees make it so long as they started getting involved with extracurriculars or even jobs as freshmen where they started to meet the right people who helped them avoid struggling after graduation with minimum wage work outside their field of study or the unpaid internship. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4747 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 24 of 31 28 February 2014 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
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"Which language for which career?" is always extremely tricky. With any of the fields discussed here a certain
language might be essential for one position but useful for the next, or even counterproductive (as in, "hmm they're applying for a job in China but they speak Spanish and Portuguese? Seems their interests are in Latin America..."). In addition, it's debatable whether you should go for something which is commonly needed (Spanish, French) or something which fewer people learn in order to make yourself unique (Portuguese, Hindi). I'll try to give you some observations I've made, however. Foreign languages are not always that useful in the legal field, your best bet if you'd like to get abroad in law is either to work for a company or firm which has offices abroad, but because you aren't a native speaker in any foreign languages, it's unlikely that you can do most legal work (draft formal documents, appear in court, etc) in most other countries, and similarly it's unlikely that you'll be called upon to advise on a foreign legal system. Most US attorneys working abroad are working in applying US corporate law to international corporations. Corporate legal positions are still no where near bouncing back to pre-recession and pre-legal bubble levels. I'd only advise this path if you get into a VERY good (say, top 5) law school, or maybe if you get an all-inclusive scholarship at a decent one. Some people also go into public interest type work, such as for the UN, State Dept., or NGO, but these days there are so many specialist degrees that are more appropriate than the very, very general JD. Those positions are all extremely competitive though, and there are fewer fallback options if you pursue this but can't secure one of the rare entry-level positions. In my experience, the people I've known in professional jobs who get to travel abroad most often are in careers where they have a specialty which is really needed in other countries and they either work for an international corporation or some sort of consulting organization. I've met people who work in environmental science (though with a hard science focus) who have worked in Brazil, supply chain management experts who get paid to travel India, a marketing professional for a large US candy company who got to travel all over Latin America, etc. I don't think International Relations degrees are a good idea right now, especially if that's the only degree you get. If you like the public policy/public service portion of that, then get a degree in that. If you like the working abroad/foreign language aspect, then something in business/marketing, especially in foreign markets, might make sense. You could always double major, if you're committed and plan ahead, and if funding allows you to do so of course. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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