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Best of the future business languages?

  Tags: Business | Career | Usefulness
 Language Learning Forum : Languages & Work Post Reply
39 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4
tarvos
Super Polyglot
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China
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Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 33 of 39
09 February 2013 at 5:24pm | IP Logged 
If you are doing hi-tech then Israel is a goldmine.
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lichtrausch
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 Message 34 of 39
09 February 2013 at 5:36pm | IP Logged 
BenMilim wrote:
What do you all think about Hebrew? I'm fully aware that it's only
spoken in one country and that Israel isn't
necessarily the best place right now for future businesses... but there's no doubt how
the Middle East is still in some
turmoil and thus a lot of attention is given to Israel and its surrounding countries.
Perhaps that's enough of a reason
to learn Hebrew? Arabic is certainly beneficial as well, probably more important than
Hebrew in fact, but I believe
there's not much you can achieve with Arabic in Israel. Or am I just imagining all this
because I'm studying Hebrew?

If you're an Israelphile, then Hebrew is the right language for you. For everyone else,
Arabic is the way to go.

Edited by lichtrausch on 09 February 2013 at 5:54pm

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Medulin
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 Message 35 of 39
09 February 2013 at 11:04pm | IP Logged 
English, French, Russian
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Serpent
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 Message 36 of 39
10 February 2013 at 1:24am | IP Logged 
and Portuguese:)
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Woodstock
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United States
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Studies: French

 
 Message 37 of 39
10 February 2013 at 7:51pm | IP Logged 
I will beg to differ a little bit from the prediction that Mandarin will be the most in demand language. There are a lot of Chinese people who are learning English. I think they will be able to retain their English much better than say, an America will be able to retain their Mandarin. But for the time being at least, I think proficiency in Mandarin would look good on the resume.

Vietnamese...Well, good luck is all I can say. :) I lived with a very good Vietnamese friend on and off for 10 years, and we are still friends today. I learned how to cook a lot of Vietnamese dishes, and I learned a lot about the culture....but with the language I hit a brick wall. I just could never master all the tones. By the way, I bought all kinds of materials too: books, tapes, CDs. I ended up donating it all to the library. My friend and his family got a big kick out of my efforts though. Oh, and you have to be a genius to translate written Viet into the spoken language. My hat is off to anyone who can master it.

It's always very dangerous to make predictions about the future, but I'd say:  English and Spanish would be the languages that a person would actually put to use over the next 20-30 years. You might also add Brazilian Portuguese.
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Zireael
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 Message 38 of 39
12 February 2013 at 3:15pm | IP Logged 
What about Japanese? It's not tonal, and if you know the kanji, you can pretty much write in Chinese too (the percentage of common characters is VERY high). I heard Chinese-Japanese meetings often consist of writing, as this way they can communicate without knowing each other's languages.

My list would be:
#1 Mandarin
#2 Japanese
#3 Spanish
#4 Arabic


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darkwhispersdal
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Wales
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 Message 39 of 39
18 June 2013 at 8:41pm | IP Logged 
Well going off the companies that the company I work for do business with and where other parts of my company are located then the main ones are:-

English
Spanish
Portuguese
Japanese
Russian
German
French
Mandarin

The lesser ones are:-
Vietnamese
Swedish

The field is biotechnology and I guess that the nature of the business will dictate the languages you will need to work with. The only other interesting development I've noticed is an increase in demand for renewable technologies in the Middle East so Arabic would be very helpful there and in India, but English seems more useful there for business.


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