My wife and I are arguing about the best foreign language for our kids to learn. We are both native english speakers. I speak Spanish and German, she speaks French. We want to leave the US for a safer more stable country for our kids and not have to worry about a random shooting. I want to move to Norway and she wants to move to Canada.
Regardless of all that, my question to yall is, what do you think is the most beneficial second language to learn either for business or social across the world?
Valid and powerful. But how will that be applicable in North America or Europe? Niche business communications with Chinese production companies? Outside of manufacturing, it seems very limited.
French might be useful, though that’d probably mean talking with French people and which parent would wish that upon their children?
I’ll go with spanish. You have spain + latin america. Plus the average level of english in those regions (including spain) is pretty low, so knowing the language would actually be useful.
In my experience most northern europe and germany you can easily wing with english.
This Australian family moved from Australia to Russia-Siberia, where it is very safe. And beautiful virgin nature. You can connect with her and talk on social networks.
Well if you want to move to Norway, Norwegian might be a good idea?
Or any other country’s language where you intend to move.
But as a linguist, my advice is to always go with the laguage with the most coverage/spread/history/culture.
E.g. you can choose Italian or Portuguese but their use is basically limited to Italy, Portugal and Brazil.
Spanish will obviously have you covered with all of South America and Arabic will open the Middle East.
I speak Mandarin Chinese, it does unlock a whole new area of the world but it’s very, very difficult for people with native Indo-European languages.
Alternatively, Russian is de-facto lingua franca in dozens of counties and will even help you in other Slavic speaking countries like Czechia, Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria or Moldova.
Most of Europe speaks English as a second language. I would suggest Spanish or German but definitely not French, French is a dead language but like Facebook is just to big to die quietly or quickly.
