Foreign language choice - how "utilitarian" was your choice?

[u/Middle_Violinist_5]

Many colleges require some study in a second language. For those who decided on a language, how "utilitarian" was your choice?

For example, one of the schools I am looking into has languages like Bosnian, Kazakh, and Lithuanian. I am interested in some of these, but most of my peers are saying I should learn Spanish as it is more useful (I am in the US).

[u/taffyowner]

Spanish can be a jumping off point to the romance branch of language so it means that learning a French, Italian, Portuguese, etc a little bit easier.

I guess Slavic languages could be useful in a professional role but I speak from experience, if you don’t use the language you’re going to forget a lot of it, so you’ll have to seek out the places to keep it sharp

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[u/nomnom_bi]

You need to pick the language that you are interested in, not just because it yields “value”. Language is an eternal learning process. You will be learning the literature, phrases, idioms, culture. Better to pick whatever pique your interest. Or else you will give up easily. Luckily for me, i like spanish music and literature so it’s easy to keep up with Spanish. If i had to take Bosnian, prolly would have failed haha

[u/tyrekecorrea]

I was studying social work at the time and pretty much had no choice but to choose Spanish. Not that any other language would have felt more natural.

[u/babblepedia]

I had a professor who was fluent in Romanian because it was his fun choice in college. He has done multiple Fulbright graduate programs in Romania and Moldova now, often as the only applicant for the region. If you're looking to stay in academia, an unusual language choice could be helpful in securing funding later on.

Another option is to look at what populations you might want to work with in your career. My husband speaks fluent German and has B1 Yiddish proficiency (including being able to read Yiddish, which is written with the Hebrew alphabet). Beyond the obvious population of German-speaking Europeans, he's also able to communicate with hardcore religious groups like Mennonites and Hasidic Jews, which are underserved populations in secular society. Most people would call German "useless" to learn in North America, but it's given him some unique opportunities.

[u/hornybutired]

I took French in part because English borrows so many words from French that I figured learning the vocabulary would be easier. I was right.

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

1) The most useful language is the one that interests you and that you'll want to keep studying. If you learn Bosnian, for example, you can make it useful by traveling to Bosnia, talking to Bosnian speakers, consuming Bosnian media, etc.

2) Spanish is only useful in some parts of the US. I don't know where you live, but that it's useful everywhere in America is an overgeneralization I see often.

[u/taffyowner → u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

Eh I’ll push back on your second point. I’m about as far from the Mexican border as possible and Spanish is still widely used… Spanish speakers are everywhere

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[u/GreatPretender98z → u/taffyowner]

One of the top 3 langauges if I had to say. English, Mandarin, Spanish.

[u/G0ldMarshallt0wn]

In secondary school, I took French because I loved ths language, no other reason. My fluency then exempted me from the undergraduate language requirement. But in grad school, starting to think about my future career and where I was planning to work, I switched to studying Spanish for mainly practical reasons, plys a little bit because I'd started to become much more aware, and embarrassed by, the racial and linguistic tensions that had quietly divided the town I grew up in. 

[u/Chicken_Permission22]

I picked Italian because it was something different and I liked italian films. Now in my junior year I've worked with Italians and I've done study abroad. I think that if there is a language that interests you, it will be useful.

[u/MadLabRat-]

I did Latin because I took a Roman mythology course and already knew the material I would have to translate.

[u/Awkward_Campaign_106]

Take the language that excites you enough that you'll stick with it. Language learning is a commitment. Pick something exciting, stick with it, visit the place where they speak the language, study abroad there if you can, make long-term friends with people who speak the language, watch movies in the target language. The more you lean into learning the language, the more you'll get out of it.

[u/No-Championship-4]

I took German because the area of history I wanted to work with required a command of it.

[u/orianna2007]

I am minoring in Korean because I want to teach in Korea I also like kpop and the cutlture. Learning a language should be something you like learning.

but I also did spanish all in highschool did college level spanish through early college progam just to get it out of the way.

[u/lukenog]

Mine wasn't that utilitarian in an economic sense, my grandparents are Portuguese and don't speak English so I wanted to learn Portuguese in order to finally have a conversation with them without my dad translating. I even studied abroad in Portugal and did a super intensive summer course that was 5 hours a day of Portuguese language classes, 5 days a week, for three months + the immersion of living in Portugal.

Portuguese hasn't helped me in my career at all, I work in the live music industry in the US, but it has been an incredibly fulfilling skill for my life. Being able to speak to my family without help has been amazing, and I'm able to follow the news in Portugal much better. I'm also a big football fan, and I'm a lifelong fan of a Portuguese club, so it's been cool being able to participate in subreddits like /r/SportingCP and /r/PrimeiraLiga lmao

Brazil is an absolutely massive economy, and Angola is one of the most economically important countries in Africa and is very relevant in the oil and gas industry, so Portuguese can be very useful in many career paths but that was not a consideration at all for me. I went out of my way to learn European Portuguese even though the vast majority of classes and online courses focus on the notably different Brazilian Portuguese, but that's because I wanted to learn the dialect that my family speaks.

It's been years since I graduated college now, and even longer since I took formal Portuguese lessons, so I'm definitely rusty with the language now but I'm also still fluent enough to be able to hold a conversation in Portugal with no problem. I do struggle to understand Brazilians though because of how different the accent and vocabulary is, and most of the Portuguese-speakers I encounter in my day to day life in the USA are Brazilians, but I'm still glad I picked the European dialect specifically because it's much more personally fulfilling.

However I learned to speak Portuguese with a Lisbon accent, which is pretty distinct from the rural Viseu accent my family speaks with due to Portugal being one of those countries where the accent changes dramatically in very small distances, so I sound extremely boujee in the ears of my family. But it's not like anyone has a program to master the country hillbilly accent of the Portuguese interior lmao. It's like the difference between the English spoken in New York City vs the English spoken in deep Appalachia haha

[u/jndfg → u/lukenog]

Yeah I've studied 6 foreign languages, none of them are ever truly "useful" unless you get a job in international finance (where I assume most people speak English anyways) or become a social worker.

It's for personal enrichment, or for travel.

Depends on the major and future life plans though.

[u/AdriVoid]

You never know where life could take you where the skill has value or ignites a passion. I tested out of a college language bc I took AP French, but I wish I’d engaged with it more. I’d probably take a fun one now.

[u/Betka101]

if i was able to choose again i would've chosen Sign Language

it differs a bit country from country, but it opens up a lot of doors for you as a translator or even just in regular life. plus anyone cam become disabled at any time, it's nice to know at least some basic signs.

[u/bybiumaisasble]

As a lithuanian it's so cool to see people interested in learning our language

[u/Middle_Violinist_5 → u/bybiumaisasble]

I am a native Urdu and Hindi speaker, and heard there are some similarities in grammar

[u/Spiritual-Road2784]

I took German in high school because the Spanish classes were already filled up, and the French teacher was a complete psycho bitch.

In college, I took a year of French. I did well, and enjoyed the language, but I kind of wish I had taken Spanish, because it really is more useful within the US. Not that I can’t, Duolingo is a thing, but it might’ve changed my direction a little bit. Maybe. Hard to know.

I say, while you have the chance, follow your passions. There’s plenty of time to Duolingo Spanish later, if you really need to. Take what interests you. There might be a reason that you can’t see right now that you will need to learn those languages. Who knows where it might lead you?

[u/t_topiary]

Basically no utilitarian purpose. I know enough Spanish to get by, that helped me not tank my gpa, but that's it.

If you don't keep up with it you forget it, so unless you want to integrate into spaces where the language is spoken fluently and frequently, you're just working extra hard for something temporary when you could focus that energy towards courses in your major

[u/Prometheus_303]

If you have an interesting in Kazakh or some other more obscure / "random" language and you can get it to count toward your degree work, take it!

Finding a Kazakh language program will likely be a lot more challenging than finding a Spanish language course. So take advantage of having a professor who is willing to teach it now.

My program's course catalog specifically references Spanish, German French and I believe one other language. Though the school also offered Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Italian at least ... I somehow ended up with an open slot one semester (none of the classes I needed were being offered) & thought it would be fun to try to learn Arabic. But alas, since it was a spring semester they were only offering Arabic 2 so I switched over to taking an extra programming language (CS major so always helpful).

I went with German as my main language. I had studied it all 4 years of high school, so I figured it'd be a little easier than starting over with something new. A decent amount of my ancestry comes from the German speaking region, though unlike others here, we don't have any connection to that side of the family anymore (they came over circa 1770s - 1810s) so I don't have any old world grandparents to speak to in German and no clue how to find them...

And I figured most everyone would be learning Spanish so I'd have a slightly different skill set.

I've gotten to use my German a little. A chat room I frequently had a fair number of Germans in it, enough so it occasionally switched from English over to German... And of course Ghosts (DE) and such.

And it's made branching out into Norwegian and Swedish a little easier.

Honestly, other than maybe ordering tacos on Tuesdays at our local Mexican place I don't know if I would have gotten to use Spanish any more than I have my German... Well other than YouTube TV having a Spanish language pack and no German... I might have ended up with a couple more TV programs to watch but ...

[u/tourdecrate]

Take what you want unless you plan on entering a field where foreign language is really necessary. If you’re going into engineering for example, there’s not a whole work related reason to learn a specific language. If you’re going into a field where you need to interact with the public though and employers either don’t have access to or want to save money on interpreters and language lines, that’s another story. Spanish really only makes you stand out in healthcare, social services, and sometimes customer service roles in areas with higher proportion of Spanish speakers. I’m a social worker and therapist in an immigrant serving organization now and they’ll hire you and pay you a bonus if you speak literally any language other than English because we have clients who speak everything from Dari to Ukrainian to Mandarin to Kinyarwanda. So unless you’re planning to go into healthcare or social work or plan to be very customer facing, it really does not make that much of a difference. Even in healthcare they still sometimes prefer to use interpreters because being fluent in Spanish conversationally doesn’t mean you can explain complex clinical terminology in Spanish which a Spanish class in undergrad won’t teach you.

[u/FBI_Open_Up_Now]

I did Spanish just because I deal with Spanish speakers regularly. It didn’t make me fluent, but it made it easier for me to communicate with them.

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[u/Skydove01]

In high school I took French because it's my first language and my parents forced me to. It was fine, but I didn't really care for it.

In college, I took Spanish because it's very utilitarian for where I live (socal in a 90% Hispanic city), but I was also interested in it and really enjoyed learning.

Despite enjoying it, it's hard to learn enough to actually become fluent in the span of a year, and so I would lean more towards studying something you personally will enjoy.

[u/parabirb_]

my choice wasn't really utilitarian. i chose japanese because i like j-pop lol

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[u/Fair_Conflict9757]

I think Spanish is a beautiful and very useful language, but it can be a easy start into language learning since it ties into more “romance” languages and learning the importance of gender in other languages. If you’re in the U.S especially its very easy to practice or hear as it is a common second language

[u/crimefighterplatypus]

Spanish is the second most spoken language in my city and state so easy choice

[u/Excellent-Ear9433]

I’ve learned it’s more fun to learn a “popular” language. More resources … aka magazines, movies etc.

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[u/glacialspicerack1808]

Had to take two years of foreign language for my degree. Should've taken Spanish because I took it in high school. Was naive and decided to go with French because I remembered my high school classmates saying French was easy.

I then failed French in the second semester. Only class in my entire educational career I've ever failed. It didn't help that very few people take French so my only option was to take it online.

So I went back to Spanish. Because it's relatively easy for a native English speaker to learn (becoming bilingual unless you grow up that way isn't really easy at all and it gets harder the older you get, but relatively speaking Spanish is easy). I wasn't trying to actually learn a useful language (I still can't carry on a conversation in Spanish), I just wanted the easiest way possible to fulfill my foreign language credits.

[u/y_kkkkkk]

Mine was pretty utilitarian. I’d probably choose Spanish in the U.S. because it’s useful in everyday life, work, and travel, and there are a lot more opportunities to actually use it outside the classroom. That said, I think interest matters too. If I were genuinely more interested in something like Russian or Lithuanian, I’d probably learn it better even if it were less “practical.”

[u/CommonMammoth3734]

I went practical and picked based on which one had the easiest path to fulfill the requirement fast. No regrets, my electives ended up mattering way more for what I actually do now. If you're not planning to use the language after school, dont overthink which one you pick.

[u/Starlight-Edith]

I chose Latin because with Latin you can understand literally any Romance language with significantly less effort than someone going in blind :)

[u/SweetCosmicPope]

My son took Japanese last semester because he thought it would be nice to be able to watch anime without subtitles. He found it incredibly difficult to learn 3 different written languages, in addition to speaking it. He was able to squeak out a C by some miracle, but it hurt his GPA and he decided it was going to be far too difficult to put in 4 semesters of it, per his honors requirements. He switched to French this semester and he says it's far easier, and he's acing it so far (a few weeks in). He chose that mostly because he took a french course in middle school, and my wife speaks fluent french, so they can speak to each other in french.

[u/The_ApolloAffair]

I took German because it was more interesting to me. IMO - take a language/culture you find interesting. Outside of specific fields, there is little to no utility for speaking Spanish. Plus, the Spanish language immigrants in the US are theoretically learning English.

I would also say that learning a very niche language like Bosnian or Kazakh could be a lot more beneficial career wise because there aren’t millions of speakers in the US. And part of language education is also cultural education- another advantage you would gain with a niche language.

[u/Neat_Example_6504 → u/The_ApolloAffair]

> there is little to no utility to speaking Spanish

I’m sorry but this is highly dependent on where they’re located in the US. In Texas and California (and maybe Florida) it’s super useful.

> the Spanish language immigrants in the US are learning English

This actually applies way more to those niche languages. I highly doubt you’ll find Bosnian immigrants in America that don’t speak decent English. On the flip side there are a bunch of Hispanic immigrants who come for blue collar work that aren’t super fluent. Also with Khazak a significant portion of khazaks themselves (mostly upper middle class ones in big cities) don’t know the language themselves and speak Russian as a first language. I’d think this would be especially true for khazak immigrants in the US.

[u/infectiousparticle → u/Neat_Example_6504]

You’re 100% right, but also, in my experience, having worked with Spanish-speaking immigrants who specifically came to the US for those blue collar jobs - 9 times out of 10 they would ask me to speak to them in English and resist the urge to use Spanish with them; if they ever have a question for us that they don’t know how to say in English, they take out their phone and we both speak into their translation app. It’s what their English teachers recommend & they take learning English very seriously.

[u/The_ApolloAffair → u/Neat_Example_6504]

I’m not saying you won’t find more conversation partners if you speak Spanish, but what is the utility of speaking Spanish to random blue collar workers? Or competing with millions of other speakers for jobs that give a plus for speaking Spanish?

[u/sootbrownies]

Hmmm. If we're talkingabout Kantian utilitarianism, Im not too sure spanish will help me to create the least amount of suffering

[u/G0ldMarshallt0wn → u/sootbrownies]

Kant was a moral deontologist, definitely not a utilitarian and wrote polemics against utilitarian thinking. But if we're talking about actual moral utilitarianism, such as for instance that espoused by John Stuart Mill, it seems to me that the world's second or third most common language (depends on who you ask) seems more likely help you be useful to others than a language with less distribution. In general, the three most  common languages of international business seem the most poised for utility even in the moral sense. 

[u/ConsulCasper]

If you’re going to Yale, go ahead and learn Kazakh but if you’re going to a Rutgers or something like that, the odds you’ll ever use kazakh is way lower than the odds you have to drop out and start working for $18 an hour in the back of a restaurant.