Hindi and Urdu

 The spoken languages of India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, are so close that the true language lover is tempted to take the plunge even though both languages use different and, to us, unfamiliar scripts (Devanagari, and a mixture of Persian and Arabic). Though other languages abound on the Indian subcontinent, Hindi-Urdu united their respective nations and whoever jumps in (despite the current lack of good learning materials) will be able to communicate with a population second only to that of China.

Russian

 

Russian is the world’s fourth language in number of speakers after Chinese, English, and Hindustani. It is extremely difficult to learn to speak Russian correctly, but the Russians have learned to be patient with foreigners who speak incorrect Russian. Journalists and others fascinated by discussing recent history with Soviet citizens suddenly free to talk to foreigners get a lot of joy out of knowing Russian. The much touted commercial advantages of learning Russian, however, have so far fallen far short of expectation.

The jobs with gargantuan salaries promised to Russian speakers as a fruit of the resurgence of free enterprise in the Soviet Union are few and shaky as the early enthusiasm of foreign investors gives way to wait and see attitudes. Long range, Russian remains a good bet for those willing to learn a language for career advantage. And in the meantime you can enjoy reading Chekhov and Dostoyevski in the original.

The Russian alphabet may look formidable, but it’s a false alarm. It can be learned in twenty minutes, but then you’ve got to face the real obstacles, such as three genders;

six noun cases with wave upon wave of noun groups that decline differently; a past tense that behaves like an adjective; and verbs that have not just person, number, and tense, but also something called “aspect” – perfective or imperfective.

Knowing Russian yields a lot of satisfaction. You want to pinch yourself as you find yourself gliding through a printed page of a language you may have grown up suspecting and fearing. Russian, like German, crackles with good, gutsy sounds that please you as they leap from your tongue. Russian is a high gratitude language. The new immigrants from the Soviet Union, though they speak one of the major languages of the world, don’t expect Americans to know it. They’ll be overjoyed to hear their language from you.

One advantage of choosing Russian is the head start it offers in almost a dozen other Slavic languages, should you suddenly want or need one.

German

Germany didn’t leave us a world of colonies where people still speak German, but they may as well have. In addition to being the principal language of Germany, Austria, and one of the three main languages of Switzerland, German is, surprisingly, the language most natives will try first on foreigners when they come visiting in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia – in fact all the way from Germany’s eastern border with Poland as far east as Moscow and from the Baltic Sea in the north clear down to the Mediterranean. English may edge German out by the time of the next scientific poll in Eastern Europe, but that leaves a tremendous number of German speakers across Europe and elsewhere. Germany’s reunification, reestablishing Germany as the central European power, can only intensify the German language’s importance.

German grammar is far from the most difficult, though you’ll be hard to convince when you find yourself trapped in one of German’s unending dependent clauses. You can wait through lunch for the German noun after a loop-the-loop adjectival clause that might translate literally as “the never- having- definitively- researched- the- mating- habits- of- the- Asian- armadillo- Dr. Schultz,” and you can wait even longer for the German verb. It’s something you get the hang of, though, and remember, German is family. Its kinship with English will be a boon throughout.

There are three genders in German and officially four noun cases, but they’re easy. In only one case does the noun itself change endings, the rest being taken care of by the preceding article, adjective, or other modifier.

German offers dividends to those interested in science, philosophy, opera, and getting a good job in international commerce.

Portuguese

 

Don’t dismiss Portuguese as some kind of slurring, overanalyzed cousin of Spanish.

The lightning population growth of Portuguese speaking Brazil alone makes Portuguese a major world language. Ancient Portuguese navigators carried the language to the mid-Atlantic, the African countries of Angola and Mozambique, the enclave of Goa in India, and even the Indonesian island of Timor.

Portuguese is the ninth most widely spoken language in the world, after Chinese, English, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, and Indonesian. Thus, Portuguese is an intelligent choice for the language “shopper” who wants to be different without abandoning the mainstream.

Portuguese nasal sounds are easier than the French and the grammar is only slightly more difficult than Spanish. Because I learned Spanish first, Portuguese will always sound to me like Spanish that’s been damaged on delivery. (That’s just a smile, not an insult. Dutch sounds the same way to anyone who’s first studied German, Danish sounds that way to anyone who’s first studied Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian definitely fits the description to anyone who’s first studied Russian.)

Spanish

 

Spanish seems to be the “natural” second language for Americans, owing to our proximity to the Spanish-speaking centres of North, Central, and South America and the growing prevalence of Spanish in our country. It’s easier for Americans to speak good Spanish than good French. It’s a more phonetic language and you don’t have the problem of the last few letters of a word being silent – as you often do in French. Also, correct Spanish pronunciation is less difficult than correct French pronunciation.

Spanish grammar is similar to French (as is that of all other Romance languages), and the subjunctive tense waits to test your character.

There are some happy surprises in store for Spanish learners. Of course you expect Spanish to carry you through Latin America and Spain, but you may not expect to be able to communicate with the older generation in the Philippines and even with Sephardic Jews in Israel (as well as Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) whose vernacular is a language known as Ladino, a fifteenth and sixteenth century Spanish with a Hebrew admixture that is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Spanish offers perhaps the grandest of good deal opportunities. Whoever learns Spanish holds an option to acquire Portugese at half price.

French

After English, French is the world’s most popular second language. Several other languages are spoken by more people: Chinese, English, Hindustani (the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu), Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, Indonesian, and even Portugese count more speakers than French. But French can be heard in practically every corner of the world and is often spoken by the most influential segments of a given population. The old French empire, though not as vast as the British, was nonetheless vast. French is therefore spoken in what you may find a surprising number of countries. So is Chinese, but the French spoken by the educated classes and government officials in Canada, Africa, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific outweighs in cultural influence the Chinese spoken in the Chinatowns of America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, London, and everywhere else.

 

French no longer deserves its reputation as “the language of diplomacy” (during how many summit meetings since World War II have the chiefs of state been able to communicate even one simple thought to each other in French?), but never mind. French is still respected and revered as a language of cultured people the world over.

 

Fully sixty percent of all those who come to practice parties at the Language Club in New York come seeking practice in French. Efforts to convince Americans shopping around for a language to learn to shift their attentions from French to currently more advantageous languages like Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic are usually unavailing. It’s French they want!

 

French lies in the middle range of difficulty to learn. The grammar is mercifully simple, but correct pronunciation with a decent French accent is hard to achieve. And for some reason, bad French comes across as much worse than bad German, bad Italian, bad Spanish, or bad anything else. The native French ear and French attitude are unforgiving.

 

There are no noun cases, but verbs inflect and adjectives must agree with nouns. There’s a subjunctive mood you’re strongly urged to learn even though the younger French themselves increasingly ignore it.

 

If you’re planning to study French along with other languages, make sure you learn French best of all. You will be judged in the world by your French, and no matter how well you handle Dutch, Hungarian, Norwegian, or Indonesian, you will not be regarded as a person of language accomplishment if your French is poor.