Trebin Newbie United States Joined 4924 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 1 of 26 02 June 2011 at 1:50pm | IP Logged |
I am 30 years old and live in Ohio. I work for the DOD and I am in information security and looking to learn a language to further my career. I have always wanted to learn one and from what I can tell Arabic and Mandarin are probably the best choices job wise. I wasn't sure so I wanted to ask and see if anyone had any input on this. I have a master's in computer science and will stay in the information security, ethical hacking area.
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Trebin Newbie United States Joined 4924 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 3 of 26 02 June 2011 at 2:40pm | IP Logged |
I am really leaning towards Arabic right now as I do know someone that speaks it fluently. I think that at this point Modern Standard Arabic may be the way to go.
Edited by Trebin on 02 June 2011 at 4:48pm
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akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5286 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German
| Message 4 of 26 02 June 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
If you want to learn Arabic, go for it! Although, Persian is slightly easier as the grammar is typically regular and some-what familiar as it is another IE language, you may want to keep this in mind as it is apparently the first language you started learning. You may like this link too.
Edited by akprocks on 02 June 2011 at 4:39pm
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Trebin Newbie United States Joined 4924 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 5 of 26 02 June 2011 at 5:20pm | IP Logged |
I am just not sure how useful Persian would be in my career.
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exscribere Diglot Senior Member IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5279 days ago 104 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Danish Studies: Mandarin, French, Korean, Hindi
| Message 6 of 26 02 June 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
If you're in information security, look at Mandarin, Arabic, Russian (since a lot of companies selling botnets,
viruses,etc. work out of Russia & the Ukraine), and possibly Hebrew (since there are a lot of good info tech groups
and security companies in that field that work out of Israel).
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MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5063 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish
| Message 7 of 26 02 June 2011 at 6:36pm | IP Logged |
I work at a retail store where a great deal of my co-workers speak Farsi. Many of the customers speak it as well. It would be nice to be able to speak with them and because of the number of speakers, it would be easy to practice. But for some reason, I do not find the language interesting enough to study it. I have had the opportunity to speak to several of them and I asked them how similar Farsi and Arabic were. From what I've heard, Arabic is definitely harder than Farsi. For whatever that may be of use to you. My only advice is to make sure you have a strong desire to learn a language and that you have enough interest in it. Otherwise you will find yourself giving up after a short while.
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iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5262 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)
| Message 8 of 26 02 June 2011 at 8:00pm | IP Logged |
I agree with exscribere. You are in "information security". Where do the most threats come from. There was a story in today's news about Gmail accounts being hacked and the hack being traced to a Chinese province. Many hackers are Chinese, Eastern European, to include Russian and Ukranian. It might come in handy to be able to read hacker message boards in Russian, Ukranian or Mandarin and even be able to pass yourself off as such (with a good command of the language) on the same forums.
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