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Useful language vs. language you like | ||
Tags: Reasons for study | Usefulness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 17 of 69 29 April 2013 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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The *sound* of the language has been mentioned a few times, but I'd say beauty is not the same as interest, and finding the language beautiful isn't necessarily enough. It's one thing if you like specific singers that sing in the language, if you have friends who speak the language and you love hearing it, if you have any interest beyond the pure beauty.
However, the mysterious beauty of what you don't understand can wear off when you get around to learning the language, and it's even more likely when you're attracted to a new writing system. That's basically why I still don't know any Sanskrit or Hindi - I find the writing system very beautiful (and I love the logic of it), but I lack an interest otherwise. It's fine if your reasons have nothing to do with the usefulness, but you do need to like a language in more than just an aesthetical way. It doesn't have to be about the culture, btw - a linguistic interest will most likely not fade before you've actually learned the grammar :) 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5000 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 18 of 69 29 April 2013 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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The advice by Lemberg "Useful language for the first foreign language" is a good one
unless your native language is a huge useful one already. As you are native speaker of English, you don't need to care in my opinion. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 69 29 April 2013 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
Only if it were as omnipresent as it is. That is, I'd learn it as a foreign language if not knowing it would adversely limit my quality of life. Apart from that English holds little philological interest to me although I'm probably showing a type of observer's effect since my judgement is very likely clouded by being a native speaker. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5157 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 20 of 69 29 April 2013 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I try to find a compromise between what I find:
USEFUL - that is, it may be added to my CV, it will give access to hundreds of millions of speakers. Language I like - it has a inguistical feature I appreciate, or the culture behind it is interesting, or I'd like to visit the place So, Chinese and Russian are languages I learn so far because I find useful. I'm sure if I ever reach an advanced level in Chinese I'll have some job oportunities, though it may take so many years that I may not find those offers attractive. Now that I'm leaving the beginner's level, I'm starting to find the language more interesting, even though I was disappointed that strictly linguistically speaking Chinese isn't that fascinating. In the case of Russian, the most urgent demand is that I want to have access to Russian textbooks for learning other languages. So, right now I'm studying a textbook about Georgian which is in Russian. Besides, I want to read the Russian litterature but i'm aware it will take me as many years as with learning Chinese well enough for a job. To summarize it, I would be learning other Slavic languages I like better if Russian weren't the most USEFUL right now. Georgian is a language I like. I plan to go to Georgia but only because I like Georgia and its culture, so, I can't really say I'm learning Georgian because I want to go to Georgia, because things are connected. Norwegian is a language I really like. I also want to use it as a doorkey to other Germanic languages because I took a break after studying German up to A2 and I like Norwegian better. So, it's mostly because I like it but there's also some usefulness chriteria. Papiamento started as mere linguistical curiosity, but being so close to languages I like, it proved to be an affective way to reach the culture of a nice people. And I'm going to Aruba and Curaçao in September. I have a list of languages that I've put on hold or haven't started yet, and I tend to replace familiar (IE, mostly Germanic and Romance) languages that i've managed to learn up to a level at which I can use only native materials. Those languages usually coincide with the usefulness chriterium because they are the most commonly studied western ones. So, last year I improved my French from textbooks and now I only learn it from native resources. That left a slot open which I filled with Norwegian, because it wasn't a language I'd be starting from scratch. Once I'm done with Norwegian at the textbook-level learning, I'll pick one of the "useful" languages I have to work on, which will be German, Spanish or Italian. I don't foresee learning a non-Romance/non-Germanic language up to a B1 level yet, though. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4242 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 21 of 69 30 April 2013 at 12:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that my recent language learning has been usefulness driven since I got out of high school. In school, I took German and Russian because they sounded interesting.
I think that most languages have a usefulness though, especially in this day where there is so much available online. The question is, what is most useful at this point? I'm improving my Spanish now because I'm going to Mexico, but I figure that I might as well learn it really well while I'm at it. I plan on improving my Russian during the last half of this year so I can speak to my Russian aunt in Russian when I visit my family over Christmas. Other languages that I'd like to learn or improve are mostly for its perceived future usefulness. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6693 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 22 of 69 30 April 2013 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll throw my hat into the discussion of what the OP was trying to ask. I think an example of a useful language would be: your company has a branch in Turkey where there is a possibility of getting a promotion if you knew Turkish. You never thought of learning Turkish before, so your first reason for considering it would be getting that promotion. I don't think he meant useful in the sense of "I'm going to live in that country for 2 years, I should know the language," but I might be wrong.
I think in the case of any of the languages I've messed around with, I've been able to find something more than just bare usefulness to get me along. I actually started learning Korean for work reasons, but I quickly picked up on Korean cinema and to a lesser degree k-pop. I also got into trying to suss out the connections with Chinese (I sometimes read my Chinese with Korean readings just to try and see connections). I've been reading more about the political and economic situation in the two Koreas (pol and econ are among my interests), including talking to people who have read native language material and there's a lot of interesting material being written in Korean that is unavailable in English. Likewise, a friend of mine decided to start learning Portuguese and challenged me to work on his with it. I never gave learning it too much thought before, but I after I started, I found out that the UFC has a Brazilian season of the Ultimate Fighter (now 2!) that was free on the web (MMA is another interest), a lot of the big Brazilian UFC fighters are on Twitter; I started digging into bossa nova and tropicalismo; I also started to look at Brazilian cinema--I had already seen Cidade de Deus, and discovered there were other movies out there worth watching. So if there is a language that doesn't really interest me at first glance, I get the feeling that I could discover enough interesting things about it to motivate me. Even though the challenge period for learning Portuguese is over and my friend who studied it isn't around anymore, it's now definitely on my hit list. I think trying to learn a language when the motivation is ONLY for work wouldn't interest me all that much, but you can always have more than one motivation. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5000 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 23 of 69 30 April 2013 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, what is useful these days can be a tricky question. Either you can go for one of
the most high demand languages which are as well the most offered ones on the job market, or you can go for a less demanded one where the competition will be lower. So, perhaps the usefulness should go through one more filter: what all could useful in my kind of career or life. This could give a larger overlap of the useful and interesting languages. I agree with Chung that the omnipresence makes English quite an exception. It is the most useful and demanded language of our time without any doubt. But doesn't this omnipresence take away part of the charm and interest? The culture from the anglosphere is attacking from every corner and if you want, you don't need to speak a word of English to get it in translation or dubbing. Of course we know the original is better in 99.9 cases out of 100. But it is not important to many usual people. We are being fed with news from the USA or GB everyday, we are being served gossip about Hollywood celebrities in local trashpapers no matter where we are, we listen to music in English in the radios etc. I'd say English today is like a young woman wearing outfit that reveals far too much. Of course most men (and some women) are looking at her. But most of them think of how to use her for one night fun while just a few notice she is as well clever, has good sense of humour, admirable character and might be the one to happily spend life with. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4659 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 24 of 69 30 April 2013 at 2:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Useful languages: English, Mandarin
Languages I like: Argentinian Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian Nynorsk German* and Italian* are useful languages in Croatia, but only for tourism and trade. I'm a medical doctor, so these languages are next to useless to me, English is THE lingua franca in medical field. (*I did study both of them, since they are compulsory subjects in elementary school and in high school, along with English). Edited by Medulin on 30 April 2013 at 2:13am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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