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An answer to Chris' followup...
May. 3rd, 2001 07:19 pmI got into Russian because I needed 6 credits of humanities to get my engineering degree. A 6-credit intensive elementary Russian course seemed the ticket, as I figured it would take half the semester to teach the alphabet, and the exams could not possibly be as hard as having to write papers on, say, Plato and Aristotle. I'd taken 6 years of French in junior and senior high school, and didn't feel like going that route at all. I wanted something impossible to learn; Russian seemed to fit the bill.
After scoring an A in the course, the Department Chairman pursued me and got me to sign up for a double major. In retrospect, not because I was so good, but because his department was hurting for bodies.
I graduated with two degrees. I got my first job on the basis of my "knowledge" of Russian (I knew more than the guy interviewing me). The job involved travel to Russia.
The job kept me in Russia for about 30 months, on and off. I got married there; my wife is a native speaker.
Russian is harder to learn than, say, Spanish, because the grammar is harder (similar to German and Latin, with six cases, which causes words to change depending on how they are used in a sentence). This aspect eventually makes Russian easy, since the relationships between words is packaged with the words themselves.
Another aspect to difficulty is the lack of many common roots with English and few cognates (words that sound the same and mean the same thing in both languages, such as "kompyuter"), though this has changed in recent years as Russia has imported scores of foreign words, many of them from English.
Personally, I have never met anyone who speaks Russian well who wasn't either born in Russia (doh) or hasn't spent a couple of years in-country away from other expats.
You're right, Spanish is a very popular second language, and not just in Texas. In the New York papers, a classified ad for a "bilingual" person pretty much always seeks someone who speaks both English and Spanish.
In such environments, in Texas, New York, California, Colorado, or wherever, the ability to speak Spanish translates directly into an ability to deal with customers (not to work as a translator or interpreter). The ability to speak virtually any other language, including French I think, falls into that "thumbs up" category that you mention.
Is any language "better" to know than any other? It depends. Up until about 1988, I understood that unless I wanted to work for the government or for the U.N., my knowledge of Russian was merely a bullet point on my resume. Then, in 1990, I was selected to go help Philippe Kahn and a team from Borland "open" Russia to products such as Turbo Pascal and Paradox; I got selected because I was a hard worker and because I spoke Russian. The experience brought me no financial recompense, but did get me recognized by upper management and earned me a gold star or two in the aftermath. By 1994, though, I was able to sell my Russian knowledge as a freelance translator for a sum that made my accountant (and the IRS) break out in grins.
I understand Japanese was a pretty popular language to study in the early 90s; I hear that enrollments for Japanese are down now, probably in response to the economic problems being experienced by the Japanese economy. The same thing happened to Russian enrollments: they went up in the late 50s in response to Sputnik, and they dropped in the late 60s as a result of Apollo.
The chic language to learn now appears to be Chinese. Are the reasons valid? Hell if I know. They sure sound good.
The variability in the popularity of this or that language directly affects how employers see the value of a particular language. If your prospective boss looks forward to opening an office in Beijing, a Ph.D. in Farsi isn't going to impress, but a smattering of Chinese will.
The point of my previous post, though, is that it really doesn't matter what language you study; what's important is that you study a second language.
Sorry to go on for so long...this is probably more than you asked for.
Cheers...
After scoring an A in the course, the Department Chairman pursued me and got me to sign up for a double major. In retrospect, not because I was so good, but because his department was hurting for bodies.
I graduated with two degrees. I got my first job on the basis of my "knowledge" of Russian (I knew more than the guy interviewing me). The job involved travel to Russia.
The job kept me in Russia for about 30 months, on and off. I got married there; my wife is a native speaker.
Russian is harder to learn than, say, Spanish, because the grammar is harder (similar to German and Latin, with six cases, which causes words to change depending on how they are used in a sentence). This aspect eventually makes Russian easy, since the relationships between words is packaged with the words themselves.
Another aspect to difficulty is the lack of many common roots with English and few cognates (words that sound the same and mean the same thing in both languages, such as "kompyuter"), though this has changed in recent years as Russia has imported scores of foreign words, many of them from English.
Personally, I have never met anyone who speaks Russian well who wasn't either born in Russia (doh) or hasn't spent a couple of years in-country away from other expats.
You're right, Spanish is a very popular second language, and not just in Texas. In the New York papers, a classified ad for a "bilingual" person pretty much always seeks someone who speaks both English and Spanish.
In such environments, in Texas, New York, California, Colorado, or wherever, the ability to speak Spanish translates directly into an ability to deal with customers (not to work as a translator or interpreter). The ability to speak virtually any other language, including French I think, falls into that "thumbs up" category that you mention.
Is any language "better" to know than any other? It depends. Up until about 1988, I understood that unless I wanted to work for the government or for the U.N., my knowledge of Russian was merely a bullet point on my resume. Then, in 1990, I was selected to go help Philippe Kahn and a team from Borland "open" Russia to products such as Turbo Pascal and Paradox; I got selected because I was a hard worker and because I spoke Russian. The experience brought me no financial recompense, but did get me recognized by upper management and earned me a gold star or two in the aftermath. By 1994, though, I was able to sell my Russian knowledge as a freelance translator for a sum that made my accountant (and the IRS) break out in grins.
I understand Japanese was a pretty popular language to study in the early 90s; I hear that enrollments for Japanese are down now, probably in response to the economic problems being experienced by the Japanese economy. The same thing happened to Russian enrollments: they went up in the late 50s in response to Sputnik, and they dropped in the late 60s as a result of Apollo.
The chic language to learn now appears to be Chinese. Are the reasons valid? Hell if I know. They sure sound good.
The variability in the popularity of this or that language directly affects how employers see the value of a particular language. If your prospective boss looks forward to opening an office in Beijing, a Ph.D. in Farsi isn't going to impress, but a smattering of Chinese will.
The point of my previous post, though, is that it really doesn't matter what language you study; what's important is that you study a second language.
Sorry to go on for so long...this is probably more than you asked for.
Cheers...
