Best language to learn for job opportunities?

BetterThanThou

I've decided to learn a language in my spare time, but I'm not quite sure what language would be best. I have an interest in German, I listen to a good bit of German music, and have somewhat of an understanding of the language, though I could not carry a conversation, but I could ask and answer some basic questions and such. However, I was thinking, German may not be the best language for job opportunities in Ireland, as there's not many German people, would I be better off learning Lithuanian or Polish? Or possibly even Arabic?

dobman88

My sister is learning mandarin in school. She is only 16 and they introduced the subject because they said the Chinese are leading the way forward in the business world. Apparently it's not the most difficult language to learn.

Prawo_Jazdy

Polish, arabic, chinese and lithuanian are all fairly difficult languages to learn.

Any language is hard to learn , and even harder to get anything near where it could be any help for getting a job, unless to just make settling into a specific country less daunting.

not trying to put you off learning one:pac: but the languages above are quite a task to learn just in spare time. I'd recomend having a bash at German, or if you want to try something new, Dutch is very similar to German.


Most job opportunties in ireland for languages are probably tutoring/teaching or in multinational communications/IT places, the latter of which actually would have a huge demand for German , but you'd want absolute fluency for something like that realistically

BetterThanThou

Thanks for the replies. Mandarin is a language I've considered learning, but I can't see myself sticking with that. I figured Lithuanian/Polish/Arabic could be good as there's a lot of people who speak those languages in Ireland, and while I don't believe there'd be many jobs centering around those languages, wouldn't some jobs benefit from knowing those languages? Working in public service for example?

Prawo_Jazdy

you'd definitely find more opportunies to use polish or lithuanian than most other languages and it could be fun and a nice way to get to know some new friends from them countries, but I dont know if i'd say it would be beneficial in a job sense.

If you do commit to trying to learn a lanugage, it's pretty important to be interested in it or at least the country from which it's from otherwise you'd probably end up going no where with it. by all means, even though it's among the hardest languages to learn (objectively and even more so from a native english speakers perspective) do polish if that what interests you, and remember learning languages is in itself a skill so if you do succeed with one, the next language should come easier :cool:

niallcon4re

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/arabic-beats-french-mandarin-beats-german-and-spanish-is-best-uks-international-education-body-highlights-most-important-foreign-languages-to-learn-8949872.html

This link from the UK government says Spanish is number 1. I checked two other google searches and the both returned Spanish, although from memory the other languages in the top ten varied. I only attached a link to something official.

A language with our alphabet will be a hell of a lot easier to learn than Arabic or Chinese.

Research I did before I studied Spanish said it would take 4 times as long to learn Chinese for an English Speaker, in Spanish I often guess words and the Spanish word is very similar to the English one, won't happen in Chinese, Arabic etc.

Also, German was a lot less "English" than I expected, a few words here and there but the grammar is much more difficult than Spanish (even though people say English is a Germanic language, they seem soooo different. )

Also, there are lots of Spanish in Dublin so after about a year of study I could meet Spanish speakers and have basic conversations, they'd then do the same in English and we'd help each other.

DO SPANISH!