Comment Re:Where are you planning on working? (Score 1) 1021
The benefits of learning even small parts of another language exceed the practicality of using it as a part of your job.
I work with a great deal of people from various parts of India. Though Hindi is not learned universally in India, everyone I have spoken with has a fairly good grasp of it.
I learned from a book and from speaking to my coworkers. It's help build some friendships where none would have existed before and gave me the chance to augment my team with tremendous resources others had passed off because of a "language barrier." (There was no barrier; just because the grammatical structure is different doesn't mean you can't understand them if you want to. Some just didn't want to. C'est la vie - it worked out to my benefit.)
My grandfather was Norwegian so I started learning Norwegian Bokmal quite passively. As the years go by, I grow more interested in the country and culture. They are some amazing people! As a consequence, when some programmers came during Thanksgiving to get trained on a piece of MOSS software we wrote for Microsoft (did that just earn me a -1 Troll?) I was invited to attend. In this case, learning a language was an opportunity to network! As a benefit, I can now read and understand Danish and I can even understand great swaths of Dutch (which seems easier to compare to Norwegian than Swedish.)
Even if it is unlikely you will need a language for your job, there are other benefits. The important part is finding something to get you interested. It is much easier to learn a language if you have a connection to it in some way. Coworkers provide a great connection. A family history is another. A coworker of mine is learning Czech because his wife's family speaks it.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a conversation with someone you'd normally have no connection with (run into many engineers in the wild, do you?) by trying to speak to them in their language. Hell, I've had long conversations with people who I've mistaken their accent for one from a language I've spoken! It's a great common ground!
*These are my experiences. Your mileage may vary. Offer void in Texas.
I work with a great deal of people from various parts of India. Though Hindi is not learned universally in India, everyone I have spoken with has a fairly good grasp of it.
I learned from a book and from speaking to my coworkers. It's help build some friendships where none would have existed before and gave me the chance to augment my team with tremendous resources others had passed off because of a "language barrier." (There was no barrier; just because the grammatical structure is different doesn't mean you can't understand them if you want to. Some just didn't want to. C'est la vie - it worked out to my benefit.)
My grandfather was Norwegian so I started learning Norwegian Bokmal quite passively. As the years go by, I grow more interested in the country and culture. They are some amazing people! As a consequence, when some programmers came during Thanksgiving to get trained on a piece of MOSS software we wrote for Microsoft (did that just earn me a -1 Troll?) I was invited to attend. In this case, learning a language was an opportunity to network! As a benefit, I can now read and understand Danish and I can even understand great swaths of Dutch (which seems easier to compare to Norwegian than Swedish.)
Even if it is unlikely you will need a language for your job, there are other benefits. The important part is finding something to get you interested. It is much easier to learn a language if you have a connection to it in some way. Coworkers provide a great connection. A family history is another. A coworker of mine is learning Czech because his wife's family speaks it.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a conversation with someone you'd normally have no connection with (run into many engineers in the wild, do you?) by trying to speak to them in their language. Hell, I've had long conversations with people who I've mistaken their accent for one from a language I've spoken! It's a great common ground!
*These are my experiences. Your mileage may vary. Offer void in Texas.
