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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

How about all the languages a programmer 'speaks' does knowing how to code in a dozen different languages help? I'd like to think so.

I keep flopping between what second language to choose, Spanish, German or Japanese.

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I've learned a couple of languages as an adult and the experience is nothing at all like learning a programming language. The road to fluency in an acquired tongue is extremely mentally taxing. You end up having quite a lot of deep, meditative thoughts sessions about the structure and usage of the language. The first few days spent immersed (i.e. speaking it all day long) can be exhausting. I've never experienced anything while learning a computer language that comes close. I guess the closest analog I could think of would be switching cold turkey from procedural to functional programming, or something.

P.S. Choose Spanish. Waay easier than German, and of course Japanese is among the hardest languages for native English speakers to acquire.

If you want to learn the language for the pleasure of speaking it, you may find it easier to find Spanish speaking people, especially in the Americas.

If on the other hand you want to increase your market value, going the extra mile might pay off since the supply of German and Japanese speakers is probably smaller by an order of magnitude while the GDP (as a proxy for the economic value of the language) is comparable and much denser.

For English speakers German should also be much simpler than Japanese.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-stu...

I think there are other factors more important than economic. That is probably one of the worst metrics to base any decision on. If the goal is money, there are many ways to get it without learning a language. Seems like an odd primary concern for language learning. That said, keep in mind that Germans and Japanese people have a much easier time learning English due to it's ubiquity than the OP would theirs, making his employment less attractive to just hiring a local who knows English. Also, going forward, there's a much better chance the spread-out Spanish 'world GDP' will increase somewhere by a large amount. The German and Japanese speaking world are maxed out on GDP potential today. Likelihood of expansion of either died with WW2.

Spanish is an unstoppable train like English has been. It's the safe bet on all fronts, and exporting its culture unlike the insular Chinese languages have remained. An American is lucky to have that be a de facto 2nd language to learn. Much of the world is stuck with something far less relevant going forward (other than English). Even French in Canada, hard to choose Spanish over French if Canada.. yet Spanish is by most metrics the better choice. That with French being one of the better choices, most nations neighbor's have even less relevant languages as an obvious 2nd language choice.

That said, the easy answer is to learn what you have an interest in. Let the money follow that.

Unless you have a specific goal in mind for learning a new language, I'd suggest Chinese. The language itself is by far much different than English (comparing with with all the language you listed above), you will learn about a much different culture than the West, and a billion speakers is nothing to scoff at.

Is there really any single Chinese dialect I could hope to learn that would enable me to communicate with a billion Chinese speakers?

Mandarin is the winner on that front. It's the lingua franca everywhere in China sans Hong Kong, although a lot/most people in some areas speak it only as a second/third language.

Same in Taiwan, and even in Singapore I've had fun speaking Mandarin with random hawkers. Taiwan is a great place to learn Chinese without having to mess with the Great Firewall and all that :)

No. They are mostly mutually unintelligible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

Yes, but most Chinese people can speak Mandarin, even if it's not their mother tongue. So learning Mandarin will indeed enable you to converse with any of a billion people.

Chinese here. Learn Mandarin. It is based on Northern dialects which are spoken by 80% of Chinese people. And it is the official dialect used in China. People are required to use Mandarin in Universities. People are also required to learn Mandarin in school.

Northern part of China is mainly flat field with little mountain, which makes the dialects similar. Some Northern dialects can even communicate without trouble. On the other hand, the Southern part of China has lots of hills and mountains making people move infrequently (in old days, before cars/trains/etc.) That's why most dialects are from Southern part. Cantonese is one of the typical Southern dialect. However, most Southern dialects cannot communicate with each other even if their speakers were live only miles away.

Seconded, but I would add that learning to write Chinese by hand is a HUGE waste of time and should be avoided. If you can choose the right character in your IME, that's good enough.

I would also add two reasons why Chinese is a much better language to learn than Japanese, because I really regret learning them in the wrong order. 1. Japanese makes a lot more sense when you can read Chinese. 2. Chinese is more inventive when it comes to new words, whereas Japanese seems to default to importing the English term. Random example, the @ character is called 小老鼠 (little mouse) in Chinese, but "ato maako" (at mark) in Japanese.

Minor detail but it's "atto maaku".

The loan words in Japanese certainly make it much easier to pick up, when you come across them. I can see it being less fun than Chinese in that context given your example.

I very strongly recommend this, too. Fun and practical.

I have been taking Mandarin lessons (eChineseLearning.com) every day for about three months, and am having the time of my life. I took my fourth business trip to Beijing after only one month of lessons (after self-teaching for about two years), and I was amazed by my ability to interact, and even negotiate prices. It was huge fun.

After only one month, I signed up for their 5-lessons-a-week plan. I get up at 6 a.m. every day to converse with my teacher in China via Skype.

I would definitely suggest one-on-one lessons, as I'm doing it. I get maximum reading and discussion time, and the conversation always starts with a description of what I've done over the last day (or over the weekend). So I'm learning all sorts of words (e.g., "clients") that I wouldn't get from a regular class.

I also know some Spanish and Hebrew. Hebrew is useful for me since I live in Israel, and Spanish is far easier to pronounce. But Chinese has been surprisingly easy overall, has helped me with my travels, and give me a big kick.

> Unless you have a specific goal in mind for learning a new language, I'd suggest Chinese. The language itself is by far much different than English (comparing with with all the language you listed above)

I'm not sure I agree that Mandarin/Cantonese are "far more different" from English than Japanese is. They are tonal languages, but AFAIK the grammatical structure of both are more similar to English than Japanese is. Japanese is rather fascinating from a linguistic viewpoint, largely because of the long periods of isolation from other languages.

That said, if one were to learn only one language, with an eye for the future, I think one could make worse choices than Chinese.

Japanese is cool. It's like natural language Haskell.

ソスケ

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