Several romance languages vs Chinese (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Several romance languages vs Chinese
Tags: Romance Languages \| Choosing a Language \| Mandarin
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13 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

LatinoBoy84
Bilingual Triglot
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French
Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Latvian

Message 9 of 13

06 May 2011 at 3:58am | IP Logged

French- France is still a huge economy and will be for a long time. The African
continent has more French speakers than anywhere else in the world. Many countries in
the region will be rapidly developing in the next couple of decades.

Portuguese- One word Brazil. BRIC economy, growing population, huge country lots of
natural resources. Portuguese is almost (but not really)free if one knows Spanish.

Mandarin- Huge country, most speakers, huge economy, has nowhere to go but up.

Arabic- Harder than Mandarin. The written standard is not spoken as much as dialects.
Requires huge investment in terms of practice. The spectrum of Arabic is nearly as big
of that in Romance languages. Hugely rewarding if one does finally master it, opens
huge opportunities in culture in a couple dozen countries.

Spanish- Oh wait you already know this one, oh well...another couple dozen countries,
huge population. The language of the Americas (in my humble opinion).

2 persons have voted this message useful

TDC
Triglot
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Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian

Message 10 of 13

06 May 2011 at 6:47am | IP Logged

I'd say do them all...you'll get the Romance languages very cheaply...and then you'll be able to spend time on Mandarin and Arabic.
1 person has voted this message useful

tibbles
Diglot
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Message 11 of 13

06 May 2011 at 7:42am | IP Logged

Start on Mandarin now. If you need to take breather from Chinese, learn Portuguese.
1 person has voted this message useful

rafaelrbp
Pentaglot
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Brazil
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Speaks: Portuguese*, Spanish, English, French, Italian
Studies: German

Message 12 of 13

06 May 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged

Without considering any other factors, I would go for a romance language, as the initial effort will be considerably small, and you will be less prone to give up.

Doing so, you will be able to make one of the following choices later on:
1. Learn the next romance language even more easily, or;
2. Learn Mandarin, as you will be more experienced in learning languages.

1 person has voted this message useful

Merv
Bilingual Diglot
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Message 13 of 13

07 May 2011 at 1:17am | IP Logged

jtmc18 wrote:

I've heard a lot about the importance of studying languages such as Chinese and Arabic versus
the traditional heavy-weights like French and Spanish. In the US it is widely perceived that Chinese and Arabic
are the languages of the future, although relatively few people study them and almost no one (other than
immigrants) can speak them.

If one already spoke Spanish, might it be a better investment to learn the other major romance languages
(French, Italian, Portuguese), or to focus entirely on either Chinese or Arabic? Or some other language? I want to
be multilingual and I think I could acquire the romance languages fairly quickly, but it seems some people
consider them to be in decline (particularly French and Italian). What are your impressions on this? Until now I
had never seriously considered studying anything outside of the Romance group, as I thought that their collective
usefulness would outweigh the merits of studying any other language by itself.

I've also heard that acquiring all the major romance languages can be done in less time than it takes to learn
Chinese or Arabic. This is another major consideration for me but, knowing very little about these other
languages, I'm not sure how true this is.

So, bottom line, would you choose between learning all the romance languages or just one of the others? I doubt
that I would have enough motivation or time to do both, at least in the near-term. Are French, Italian and
Portuguese being overshadowed by Chinese and Arabic to the extent that I should redirect my efforts? In other
words, will Chinese and Arabic eventually be more useful for travel, career prospects, etc. than French and the
others?

Romance languages are the best bang for your buck, bar none. I've thought about this before and there's no
other family or subfamily of languages that is that "useful" and yet very accessible. The grammar is not too bad,
the vocabulary is very accessible to the English speaker. There are four big languages in this family - Spanish,
French, Italian, and Portuguese. French and Italian are considered top languages of culture, with Spanish and
Portuguese not too shabby either. Spanish and Portuguese are spoken by hundreds of millions of native speakers
and French and Italian by tens of millions. Plus, if you ever decide to learn the "parent" language - Latin - that,
too, is a useful ancient language.

3 persons have voted this message useful

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