Reply to Re: Languages
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My list would mostly consist out of rational choices, languages I could one day need or at least use. My choices would be:
Spanish
Mandarin Chinese
Japanese
German
Hungarian
Spanish is because it's one of the most widely spoken languages around, especially in South/Central America. And I really should add a romance language in this list. While French would be a good inclusion too I'm not really planning to go to Africa any time soon and the level of French I speak already is sufficient to survive most basic situations.
Mandarin Chinese is the most the most widely spoken dialect of Chinese. (Just stating 'Chinese' is a bit vague as individual dialects can be almost completely unintelligible to speakers of other dialects.) This is obviously a career choice, about one sixth of the world's population speaks Mandarin Chinese and this part of the world is set to become a lot more wealthy in the near future...
Japanese is similar this way. Japan is a large economic power and many Japanese don't speak English very well. And while I'm not really into anything Japanese specifically I can't deny that I'd like to visit Japan someday too.
I already speak enough German to get around in most cases, but to have a technical business conversation my German is most definitely lacking. As Germany is just a short hop to the east of here and Germany is by far the largest trading partner of the Netherlands it makes it an easy choice. Also I really love the agglutinative nature of the language, you can see some really nice words around.
Lastly I've included Hungarian because, like Magicman, I would love to have a Finno-Ugric language added to the mix. My preference is with Hungarian over Finnish though, mostly because it looks even more alien to my eyes...
Maybe I should have added some ancient languages such as Greek and Latin or some modern languages such as Arabic or Italian as they let you understand a lot more about arts, religion and/or history, but since I've got only five slots these will have to do.
I only added natural languages because I can't see the point of letting a constructed language into one of my precious five slots. I wouldn't even use one if I had 15 slots I think. It just doesn't help enough in communication, and it doesn't really let me understand arts or sciences any better either. Also I think that adding a programming language is pointless. Programming is much more of a skill then knowledge, just because you know a language doesn't mean you can do anything with it, contrary to a natural language. And you already know what you can do with a natural language because you have learned one already.
Spanish
Mandarin Chinese
Japanese
German
Hungarian
Spanish is because it's one of the most widely spoken languages around, especially in South/Central America. And I really should add a romance language in this list. While French would be a good inclusion too I'm not really planning to go to Africa any time soon and the level of French I speak already is sufficient to survive most basic situations.
Mandarin Chinese is the most the most widely spoken dialect of Chinese. (Just stating 'Chinese' is a bit vague as individual dialects can be almost completely unintelligible to speakers of other dialects.) This is obviously a career choice, about one sixth of the world's population speaks Mandarin Chinese and this part of the world is set to become a lot more wealthy in the near future...
Japanese is similar this way. Japan is a large economic power and many Japanese don't speak English very well. And while I'm not really into anything Japanese specifically I can't deny that I'd like to visit Japan someday too.
I already speak enough German to get around in most cases, but to have a technical business conversation my German is most definitely lacking. As Germany is just a short hop to the east of here and Germany is by far the largest trading partner of the Netherlands it makes it an easy choice. Also I really love the agglutinative nature of the language, you can see some really nice words around.
Lastly I've included Hungarian because, like Magicman, I would love to have a Finno-Ugric language added to the mix. My preference is with Hungarian over Finnish though, mostly because it looks even more alien to my eyes...
Maybe I should have added some ancient languages such as Greek and Latin or some modern languages such as Arabic or Italian as they let you understand a lot more about arts, religion and/or history, but since I've got only five slots these will have to do.
I only added natural languages because I can't see the point of letting a constructed language into one of my precious five slots. I wouldn't even use one if I had 15 slots I think. It just doesn't help enough in communication, and it doesn't really let me understand arts or sciences any better either. Also I think that adding a programming language is pointless. Programming is much more of a skill then knowledge, just because you know a language doesn't mean you can do anything with it, contrary to a natural language. And you already know what you can do with a natural language because you have learned one already.
