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Languages to help you earn more money? | ||
Tags: Career | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Languages & Work |  | |
| FrenchLanguage Senior Member Germany Joined 5670 days ago 122 posts - 135 votes  | Message 1 of 8 25 May 2009 at 1:28pm | IP Logged |
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Can a language help anyone actually earn more money? Everybody says how "important" languages are in business/marketing. If you can make yourself a niche - e.g. I can speak French and France is Germany's biggest trading partner, but French has become extremely uncool to study (except for people living in the border region) as the German education system seems to have opened up to Spanish which is widely studied, now...then I should be in a position where the demand/supply ratio is in my favor in the job market.
Yet, I'm wondering: Does it really help anyone earn more money? or does it "only" make getting a job in the first place easier? I assume if it does, then in some way it should make moving up the ladder easier (and thus earning more money), too? I haven't been able to see any evidence that being able to speak a foreign language (or multiple ones) can help you earn more money in your career. I plan on studying another language, but will do that only for the fun of it... what Im wondering, though..is the whole advice that one should learn a foreign language (other than English) for your career (blabla) complete crap? or do you know anyone who could leverage his language skills to his favor career-wise? I remember many people suggesting to me I should learn chinese (b/c of studying business and being talented at languages) if I wanted to earn a lot of money (...), but does it really help? I remember speaking to somebody who was in Shanghai as an intern (a business student) who told me he didn't see any signs of it helping him that much. What do you guys think?:-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5699 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 2 of 8 25 May 2009 at 2:07pm | IP Logged |
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For business people, it may be useful in earning friendliness.
For technical/scientific purposes, people much prefer speaking (and listening) in their own syntax with English words, rather than in English. So it may actually help intercomprehension. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5603 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 8 25 May 2009 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
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I wouldn't say that speaking foreign languages can make you earn more money, in the sense that an engineer who speaks 5 languages doesn't necessarily earn more than an engineer who only speaks one language. But, speaking foreign languages definitely increases your opportunities, especially if you want to work abroad as an expat or in a multilingual country such as Switzerland or Luxembourg, or even in an international company where you have a lot of contact with foreign clients. It is definitely a huge plus on your CV when you look for work or want to be promoted, but I don't think that language skills alone are enough to raise your paycheck. I would say that it depends very much on where you want to work and in what area. For some professions, language skills are more important than for others. And in some multilingual regions, the more languages you speak, the better your career prospects.
I am a freelance translator, so I can actually say that I earn my living thanks to my language skills. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| pfwillard Pro Member United States Joined 5633 days ago 169 posts - 205 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 8 25 May 2009 at 11:41pm | IP Logged |
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It is only good for getting into a career in espionage. As for making more money, I do not believe anyone has an answer to that question given the present economic reality.
In U. S. organizations the tendency is to rely on native speaker translators rather than send someone with proficiency. I am curious as to why French is "extremely uncool" in Germany right now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5849 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 8 26 May 2009 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
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In English-speaking Canada (at least, here in Ontario), if two people do the same job equally well and have similar experience/seniority/etc, but one of them can speak French and the other can't... the one who can will often earn more money, even if they don't use French much on the job. So yeah, in this case it really does pay to know French.
But that doesn't really apply to Germany, so I guess that's not useful for you :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| GuardianJY Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5619 days ago 74 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Swedish, French | Message 6 of 8 26 May 2009 at 6:32pm | IP Logged |
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I agree with the "friendliness" aspect. You may necessarily make more money if you have the charisma needed to get more contracts, clients, etc. The general consensus is that people are more friendly toward you if you speak their language; especially if you speak that language well. So, will you earn more money? Probably, but it is based on the profession. Almost certainly any "profession" like Engineering, Medical, or Law, and then business as well. Also, the prospects for managerial positions are likely to increase as well. For example, in Texas there is a large Spanish population, so being able to speak Spanish would enable you to communicate more effectively with a portion of the workers. So, it's normally not a direct monetary increase, but an indirect one. Also, you could translate things in your "spare" time, in which case would earn you more money directly. Edited by GuardianJY on 26 May 2009 at 6:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| FrenchLanguage Senior Member Germany Joined 5670 days ago 122 posts - 135 votes | Message 7 of 8 26 May 2009 at 8:13pm | IP Logged |
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@pfwillard:
French used to be pushed quite a lot in the German education system, but nowadays students can choose Spanish (which they associate with Spain, hot weather, etc.) over French (which many consider "gay" :-))...the girls probably dont consider french as a "gay" sounding language, but still prefer Spanish......simply the fact that the education system allows students to choose other languages (or well mostly Spanish) seems to be the reason why (before they were kind of forced to take french...and then some of them were more inclined to stick with it once they already knew some). It might be completely different in the border region of Germany/france though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hangdog Newbie MalaysiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5946 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Studies: French | Message 8 of 8 31 May 2009 at 5:25pm | IP Logged |
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Unless your profession is directly or indirectly deal with languages it will not help in actually making money for you.
I have actually seen people learning language really fast because they need it in their work and the company pay them good money. Once they started using the language they had studied in their work their language improve even more.But I would like to point out that those who succeeded were only a few, handful of them and the rest didn't make it. It took them only 3 years to do it and it took me almost 6 years. So I was surprised that they could do it in such short period of time. I do know that translators or interpreters are paid quite well. But to reach that level is almost impossible for me. But still you could find joy in speaking a foreign language and making friends with people who speak your target language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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