Among the non-romantic languages, which is most useful to learn? And which are the easiest and the hardest?

Answer 1

"Most useful" depends on your purpose in learning the language. For science and math, German, Russian and Japanese are important. For political purposes, Chinese, Arabic and others may be more important. If you want to travel, obviously it depends on where you'll be traveling. For reading literature, Russian might be a great choice--you have Pushkin's poetry, the novels of Tolstoy, Chekhov's plays and short stories, etc etc.

I am a professional Japanese-English translator. Japanese is very difficult in several respects, very easy in others (pronunciation is mostly easy; verb conjugations are trivial). The writing system is very difficult; the grammar is completely different from that of English.

I also read Russian. It is somewhat difficult, but not excessively so. It is a very systematic language, i.e. there are very few exceptions to the rules of grammar and orthography.

I have dabbled in Chinese and Arabic. Chinese grammar is actually similar to English grammar, but otherwise it seems to be a hard language to learn. Arabic pronunciation is difficult (or was for me), but the writing system is much simpler than Chinese or Japanese.

...but don't worry about how hard the language is. If you put the time into it, you can master any language. Instead, think hard about why you want to learn the language.

Answer 2

I thought that romance languages are the ones that come from Latin or even Greek i.e. Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. English might be in it to since the language has mixed with a lot of these languages and also has some roots in Latin and Greek. So how can people think that Spanish is a non romantic language.
Anyway, the most useful and hardest language to learn I think it would be Chinese.
Well-spoken Spanish is one of the most beautiful languages in the world, but that's just my opinion.

Answer 3

Well, Spanish is a non-romantic language. Personally, I think Spanish is a hideous language, but useful to learn at this point considering all the immigrants that come to America and refuse to learn our language. I refuse to learn Spanish because I'm not going to help out the illegal immigrants. I'm against them thouroughly, but if you want to be able to communicate with 90% of your co-workers, it's useful. Other than that, I can't think of any un-romantic, useful language.

Answer 4

Well U2Fan Arabic is a very romantic language!!!
You just don’t know it or read any Arabic poetry before.
Anyway, Arabic is quite difficult to learn, but I like being able to write in 2 languages written from opposite sides.
I think Chinese is very difficult and also Japanese given that it’s also written from up to down.
Learning any of these languages will enable you to get to know a whole very rich, different and interesting culture.

Answer 5

i have to agree with some of the other people in saying arabic or chinese would be the best. If you want to look at foreign policy, we deal most critically with the middle east and asia (china and korea). It depends on what you want to do though. If you want to work with the government i would totally reccomend either one. I would also say it would be better to look at your geographical area and see if it consists more of arabs or asians so you will have more resources and a better chance to practice. They are very hard languages especially since they have completely different alphabets compared to english. Either way be sure to study hard and practice it everyday or you wont be any good.

Answer 6

The most useful ones would be both Arabic and Chinese. I speak Arabic, and although it is a little more straightforward than some Romance languages, it is a little complicated when it comes to idiomatic expressions and figures of speech. It's easy to translate or interpret from but not into.

Chinese, I don't speak, but I have heard that it is very complicated, more complicated than Arabic.

Answer 7

Depends on where you are, what do most of the people around you speak. Where I live, it would be Spanish and Vietnamese. In general, Latin and Greek are good to learn because words often have a Latin or Greek root-- so if you know these languages it will be easier for you to learn and memorize vocab. esp. for careers in medicine, bio, chem etc.

As for the hardest, any language with tonations is hard to learn ie. Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese...all of these types of languages require you to put tonations (accents) on words in order to get their meanings to change.

Hope this helps!!

Answer 8

I would guess Arabic would be the most useful non-Romantic language to learn at this point.

Answer 9

Depends on what you consider useful. If you mean useful because more people will speak it in the future, or because it's spoken by a rising economic superpower, then I would learn Chinese, or possibly Japanese. If you mean useful to you based on who you're likely to talk to in the future, that depends on where you expect to travel in your lifetime. Impossible for anyone other than yourself to answer that one. As for hardest, I found Chinese to be the most difficult -- no alphabet, and the vocal inflections totally stymied me.

Answer 10

Japanese & Chinese as difficult, non-romantic languages that are useful to learn. They are threats to our World Power.