> an extra language
I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel
Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead
I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel
Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead
I had friends who went through the same language school for Chinese and German among other languages and they never used it. All the German linguists got reclassed into other languages like Spanish in the 90s. Last year I went on vacation to Puerto Vallarta and it was so useful even in a tourist heavy place like that. But I am sorry you do find it useless and I don't doubt it based on whatever your daily life is like and hobbies.
On a separate note it's not too late to learn Chinese or German!
Chinese/Mandarin might be super useful if you're living in China or a nearby country, but a) why would you want to live in China if you're not Chinese? And b) the language of international business in China is still English.
- There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speakers in Italy. It's also useful as approximately the root language of Germanic languages, and makes it faster to pick up e.g. Dutch and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian languages.
- All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. Large swaths of Germans speak no, or only basic travelers' English. That everyone speaks English in Germany is an illusion that English speakers experience in Germany because they largely mix with only one social class, and the non-English speakers are invisible to them.
(I'm a native English speaker and fluent German speaker who's lived in the US and Germany for equal amounts of my life. My girlfriend, for example, is not comfortable in English, nor are quite a few of my friends, particularly those that are blue collar, somewhat older, or from the east.)
But the social class thing you mentioned is kind of my point. I think it's pretty much true in all of those German speaking countries, that if you only want to interact with service workers in cities and professional, college educated, internationally minded people, you will have plenty of people to talk to and might not ever feel a need to know German.
Angela Merkel can definitely speak English.
That means they aren't internationally minded then.
It's also a pretty terrible thing to assume that everyone who wasn't born into the upper class isn't internationally minded. Again, my girlfriend doesn't speak English well because she's from a working class family from the east, but she's been to a couple dozen countries, and manages a team of people from several countries.
> It's the 3rd most spoken language in the US
That's interesting, but why would that influence your decision which language to learn? Almost all the Cantonese speakers in the US probably speak English, and there aren't that many in the grand scheme of things? (Especially compared to total number of Mandarin speakers.)
But an average young nurse will probably only speak bad English and can maybe say a few broken sentences.
I know quite a few of them. Comes with growing up in Germany.