Seeking for opinion on languages

I'll start to learn a new language in my local university this September, but the trouble is I'm not sure yet which language I should learn.

I'm half-way through my degree of International Relations, therefore I must choose a language acording not only to it's practical usefulness but also for its political, economic, historical and cultural values.

Owing to the field I'm in, I must also take into acount the rareness and (political) value of the language; English, being the vehicular language of choice for internacional communication, has the highest and the lowest value possible.
It is highly usefull but how worth is the language nowadays in a resumé (for a non-english speaker)? A lot and almost none, because everybody else speaks it.

The way I see it, I have to choose a language that is important and large enough to have intrinsic value, but relatively rare to increase its value, specialy if the language in question has strategic value (Chinese, Arabic etc).

The languages I can choose from are English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Greek, Finnish etc for european languages and Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Korean and Japanese for non-european languages.

I'm thinking of learning one of these:

German (large, important politicaly, economicaly and otherwise, central in Europe, vast cultural resources and does not sound very bad to my ears)

Russian (large, important, peripheric but strategical, also culturally important, challenge to learn another alphabet, sounds ok)

Arabic (large, growing importance, culturally peripherical, "isolated" civilization, do not like the sound of it, another alphabet)

Turkish ( not very large but still considerable number of speakers, strategicaly important, more so if Turkey ever joins EU, might be culturaly interesting, sounds neutral, neither good or bad)

Polish (not large but centraly located within Europe, culturaly important specificaly because of access to material dealing with Esperanto, a language I interested in, otherwise not much interest, don't like the sound much)

Dutch (my first love in "rare" languages (others apart from English, French, Spanish and other "important" languages); what I like in the language is the graphic look of it, with the lovely double consonants aa and ee and, believe it or not, the SOUND of it. I don't know why, but I just love the sound of Dutch. The major drawbacks are small amount of speakers (less than 30 million in Europe) and general unimportance of the language worldwide)

And that's it. I'm sorry for the long post, but it would be very, very important for me to have some feedback on this. After all I will invest time and money on learning a new language.

Thank you for your opinions in advance!

just learn learn spanish.
Yeah I said it so what!

Iago,first of all please tell us what your mother tongue is and in which university you're studying.
I suggest you study Russian though it'll be difficult to you.I think it'll be very useful in your research field.

My mother tongue is portuguese and I study in live in Porto. The language courses are taught in Faculdade de Letras of Porto but that's not my university, I study in another, private university.

Do you want to learn all of them in your life anyway?

Depending on your areas of interest (quite diverse, I can say)... you may do some planning about the learning sequence (if you learn more than one), the possibility of learning them elsewhere (esp. the less studied ones) and whether it is beneficial to study it/them at your university.

Personally, even though I'm somewhat half-way in learning German grammar, I still won't learn any French at my university at all, because 1) I still haven't reached any fluency in German, 2) I want to know more about the very language I'm learning now and 3) I can use tons of materials and/or take courses elsewhere to learn French.

Also, practical wise, I don't think it's a good idea to learn languages that are remote from each other one by one. For example, if your favourite language pool should include 4 or 5, and you focus on European languages, it'd be somewhat difficult to include an isolated non-European one (Chinese/Arabic, etc).

I'd say Russian or Spanish (which should come easily because of your native language).

It´s strange. You say only difficult languages. I´d choose Italian, French or Spanish. The easiest, the better. Perhaps, you will use more times Spanish in your life.

If you're going to be in international relations, and you're just starting out, you might as well bite the bullet and start learning Chinese. By the time you get up to speed in Chinese (10-20 years?), Chinese should be extremely important in international commerce.

As german native speaker who also is going to learn some Turkish, I recommend you to study German and Turkish. In Germany, Turkish is also a widely spoken language, because of the many Turks here. So if you should ever visit Germany, you can benefit from both of them. Furthermore, Turkish languages are a language family spread over a very wide area, an area where in parts also Russian is spoken, so some of the not language related reasons for learning Russian hold for Turkish as well. Turkish gives you a chance for experiencing a non indoeuropean language in contrast to the indoeuropean language you already know.

Thank you all for your input!

The reason I'm not interested in learning other latin languages (not now anyway) are several: they are too "easy", in the case of Spanish and French spoken by too many people, meaning they a high profile and its value decreases a little .

If I were a translator of portuguese/finnish and finnish/portuguese I would almost certainly get a job somewhere requering these skills, say in Brussels for example; if I were a translator of english/portuguese or even spanish/portuguese there would be lots of people with the same skills and therefore decreasing job opportunities.

I think rare is good and dificulty is a chalenge. Originaly I had Chinese on my short list but at the university they told me the chinese teacher doesn't speak portuguese yet, so the course would be given in english and that rules chinese out for the moment.

Anyway, I'm trying to find a balance between very large languages (usefulness high, intrinsic value/rareness low), large languages (uselfuness average, value high) and small languages (uselfuness increasingly low, value high or average but decreasing).

Those are my reasons for not going to the big languages or to the rare but rather small languages. Right now I'm inclined between German and Turkish, one being very useful and having large resources and the other being rare but important.

<<If I were a translator of portuguese/finnish and finnish/portuguese I would almost certainly get a job somewhere requering these skills, say in Brussels for example; if I were a translator of english/portuguese or even spanish/portuguese there would be lots of people with the same skills and therefore decreasing job opportunities. >>

But there's much more demand of English/portuguese skills, so probably it balances out.

<<I think rare is good and dificulty is a chalenge. Originaly I had Chinese on my short list but at the university they told me the chinese teacher doesn't speak portuguese yet, so the course would be given in english and that rules chinese out for the moment.

Anyway, I'm trying to find a balance between very large languages (usefulness high, intrinsic value/rareness low), large languages (uselfuness average, value high) and small languages (uselfuness increasingly low, value high or average but decreasing).>>

Despite the sheer difficulty of Chinese, you should find it easy enough to find learning materials in English...well, English is so useful as a mediating language for me, a Chinese, to know the European languages, including Portuguese (if I were to learn). From an int'l perspective, the competition among English-related jobs shouldn't be too keen, and the market still keeps on expanding... but, certainly, you would lose the chance easily to get to know other languages if you specialize in English instead.

As I implied, if you find a language (like Turkish in regard to your country and background) to be "rare", it would be a precious opportunity to learn it at university.

Franco is right, like always:)

I think that there's much more demand of English/portuguese skills, so probably it balances out.

If you are going to have a degree of International Relations, I´d choose English and Spanish or English and French, a customary choice.

There are a lot of people that speak English, Spanish (or French) and Portuguese, for instance, but the demand of jobs is also very high.

At the same time, it is important the difficulty of the language. It is easier for you to study English and Spanish (both together) than one difficult language (Chinese, Arabic or Turkish).

Dear Xie Z.A,

Being a chinese person, can you give me any information (if you can) about the status of the language Esperanto in China?
I've read some time ago that until a few years ago, the Chinese government payed people in universities to learn the language, because it thought Esperanto was important?

Does that still hapen or has the Chinese government droped Esperanto as impractical or useless? Does it invest massively in English instead?
I've also heard of broadcastings in Esperanto by Radio China International.

Thank you very much!