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Ask HN: What foreign language should Joe learn?
tldr: What foreign language should a monolingual English speaking software engineer learn?
Here's a situation (that doesn't exist)... Let's say we have a guy named Joe...
- Joe was born as a native English speaker
- Joe only speaks English fluently (but he knows lots of programming languages!)
- Joe is a software engineer in an English speaking country
- At Joe's company, the official language used by the business is English
If Joe were to learn another foreign language, which one should Joe learn?
Please explain why! Is there one that is more beneficial (and opens more job opportunities) for software engineers? Let's just pretend that there are no outside factors, and that Joe just wants to learn another language to be FLUENT in. He is striving for fluency. Time doesn't matter, etc. Which would be most helpful to Joe? Esp as a software engineer?
- warrenm 9y agoWell, "Joe" should learn whatever he wants. Maybe it's somewhere he's always wanted to visit / live. Maybe it's where he wants to work next. Maybe it's what he expects to be handling next wherever he goes to work Maybe it's where he expects new customers to be coming from. Some options that'd fulfill various versions of those possibilities: - Spanish - German - Korean - Hebrew - Arabic - Russian - German And on and on and on.
- grawprog 9y agoI'd like to learn Cantonese. Mostly so I can understand what the hell my coworkers are saying when they talk to each other.
- twobyfour 9y agoWhat's Joe's reason for learning a foreign language?