Over the years, I've worked with about 20 different languages. I learned a lot of them purely out of interest. Even if you won't need it for any "serious" or paying work, it can be useful to learn a new language that is different from the languages you know. For example, if you know C# you won't learn that much by working with Java; they're too similar. By contrast, if you try learning a language like Haskell or Go instead you'll get introduced to new ways of thinking.
In almost all languages, there are things you can do easily or "naturally" in it. These language (and framework) features usually influence how you would design a program in that language. And it's these concepts that are worth learning. For example, when I learned Ruby and later Haskell, I learned how powerful concepts like map/select or working with closures are.
This knowledge then transferred to the languages I usually work with; my designs in my "traditional" languages changed because of the things I learned while working with other languages.
So even if the new language is not "one the rise" it might pay off by indirectly improving your skills in the languages that you do get paid for.
With SubVersion, you can check out subtrees instead of the whole repository (even non-recursively, so you can check out a directory "in the middle"). That's something that Git or Mercurial can't do by design; IIRC it's because the always-complete-repository approach makes merging and other tasks much, much easier. In your SVN working copy, only the data of commit you've checked out are stored. For everything else SVN needs to contact the server which depending on the requirements and workflow, is either a good or bad thing. On the other hand, Git and Mercurial do have the complete history locally which allows them to perform a lot of tasks without contacting a server that SubVersion could not do (simple example: get log history of a file).
But it's actually besides the point: all of these things won't matter to an office user. Ease-of-use and chances-to-screw-up do.
Now you've got into rant-mode, sorry. I really hope non-technical people are never forced to actually type in commands but use a GUI instead, no matter which VCS they use. But especially with Git. I think Git is a very powerful tool and have come to like it for its features, but I still hate it for its commands and what I feel are inconsistencies and "fuck how other VCS are naming it, we use something different".
For example, discard changes on a single file: "git reset foo.bar". Discard changes on all files: "git checkout --
Why not use the time to learn English first. It will be more useful to her than programming.
Learning a whole language first isn't much fun. Also, lots of people I know (me included) learned programming first, then (through programming) english. I started with GW-BASIC at age of 7 and almost everything was in english: the programs I had, even the manuals. I picked up basic english from this (after some trial and error you understand what certain words or phrases mean; I was pretty surprised when I learned at school that these words are pronounced totally differently than I imagined
I even knew a pretty good programmer who still does not speak english. He couldn't ask for directions if he'd get lost. Yet he manages to do hold up as a professional. Couldn't believe it at first, but it shows that knowing english does help when developing but it's not strictly necessary. The good thing about programming is that the syntax rules are so much more strict and easier to understand than natural language.
"The following is not for the weak of heart or Fundamentalists." -- Dave Barry