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Metus comments on Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am not particularly interested in the answer to this question but this community's answer: I know English and German. Should I learn another language and if yes which? Please explain your reasoning.
I think this is probably really hard to answer sensibly without some more information about you and your goals.
Agreed.
Chinese seems to be a good general choice, just because so many people on the planet speak it and because China is/will be an important actor in the global theater.
In spite of this, I'm studying japanese just because it's at the crossroads of three things I find supremely fascinating: go, anime/mangas, and japanese culture (with the implicit plan of a trip to Japan in the near future).
Other examples: if you think you'll have to deal with european beureaucracy, French might be a good choice, or Spanish if you want to have anything to do with dancing, etc.
OTOH see this. (Some things have changed in the last 18 years, but most haven't.)
I'm surprised to see French so much higher in many of the charts.
I like learning languages (Esperanto, German, Chinese, Japanese), but consider it as more of a hobby than a useful skill, unless you're planning to move abroad, or have a job that involves a lot of travelling, or marry someone from there.
More useful than video games, reading fiction, surfing on reddit, playing chess.
Less useful (marketable) than programming, self-marketing, public speaking, fixing up your house, negotiating a salary, driving a car, fixing a car...
Probably about as useful as drawing, or doing advanced maths.
What exactly do you mean by "marketing" in this context? Marketing in a business sense is not something I'm familiar with people learning as a self-taught skill, and I'm not sure how seriously employers would take it, but self-marketing as a general skill is broad enough to seem like the odd one out among those options.
self-marketing then. Why would it be the odd one out, that one is the list of useful things.
I'm not disputing that it's useful, but it's like seeing a list of "fun" things which includes "watching videos," "playing solitaire," and "doing things with friends." One is so much broader than the others that it could easily be separated out into useful subcategories and take up more space than the rest of the list.
For people who spend a lot of time in the United States I often recommend learning enough Spanish to curse plausibly, make casual smalltalk, ask for directions, and order lunch in, because it's not rare to find communities here where doing so gets you marked as an insider, or at least a potential ally, with all the associated benefits of that marking.
(Warning: much of this comment is wild speculation.)
Pros:
Cons:
If you don't have a need for learning a specific language then I think that you should put your learning efforts elsewhere.
There are many areas where effort gets higher returns.
I am curious what you mean by this. If someone/we find a more optimal solution, we should adopt it, no?
I wanted to indicate that it is not very important for me to know what language I should learn if any at all as I already have a particular interest in some languages but that I am curious about how this community would go about answering this question which rises up from time to time with various answers.