Computer Science and Foreign Languages, what is the best mix?

October 24, 2008 9:40 PM

I am trying to make a preliminary (or maybe final) decision on what foreign language I should study with respect to a computer science major after transferring to the University of Michigan. Any pointers???

Previously.

I am more or less looking for a foreign language that would be most compatible with my career path and would most likely use after spending 4 semesters learning it.

I have heavily considered Japanese to be a good choice for a long while, but Chinese and Arabic seem interesting as well.

If there is something outside of those three that I should consider, please let me know.

Thanks!

posted by JoeXIII007 to education (24 comments total)

Japanese probably isn't worth it, business-wise. Your interface people in Japan would, more than likely, speak English better than you'll learn Japanese.

Arabic might be useful, but (as a hacker) I don't tend to think of the Middle East as being where software comes from. They may be your clients, but they're unlikely to be your vendors or manufacturers. So, the likelihood is that some salesperson who speaks Arabic (or doesn't need to) is going to make the deal and draft the requirements, and you'll never actually have face-time with them.

Mandarin would be the best choice of those three, I think. I've twice now had to interface with the Chinese, once as vendor and once as client. I really, really, really fucking wish that I'd spoken Chinese.

Keep in mind, though, that both Chinese and Japanese have a large educational cost in learning the pictograms. Without knowing at least a couple thousand, you'll be functionally illiterate in those languages. A roman-alphabet language might be a better investment, cost:benefit wise.
posted by Netzapper at 9:51 PM on October 24, 2008

If you're only going to take four semesters, don't bother with Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, etc. You're just not going to make significant progress toward useful communicative ability. Try a latin-based language. I took four semesters of Spanish before I ever visited a Spanish-speaking country and when I arrived I was able to converse with basic proficiency.

However, while living in China, I met a lot of students of the language who had studied for quite awhile in high school or college in America or Europe and those students were not really able to do very much at all besides parrot certain phrases and read menus. Unless you have a really rigorous undergraduate language program, four semesters of introductory language without constant out of class reinforcement won't get you anywhere. Not that it wouldn't be educational or enjoyable.

If you think you might go above and beyond in class requirements, I don't think you could go wrong with Arabic or Chinese, just go with whatever culture you are initially most interested in.
posted by bluejayk at 9:58 PM on October 24, 2008

You are overthinking this plate of beans.

You live in the US? You plan to continue living in the US? Yes?

Spanish is the hugely obvious no-brainer answer.

There's a small but nonzero chance that you could communicate more effectively with clients who are more comfortable in Spanish, or design software intended to have bilingual input/output.

There's a much larger chance that, hey, at least you could get some sense of what Don Francisco is saying to the blond with big tits on Sabado Gigante*, or of how filthy some Molotov songs are. Or enjoy watching Looney Tunes cartoons on Univision when you are very stoned.

*He's talking about how big her tits are.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:03 PM on October 24, 2008

Ooh, I got my CS degree with 2+ years of Japanese, 15+ years ago, am taking Mandarin 1 at a city college now, so I can answer this one!

First, the pictograms are the COOLEST part of learning Japanese and Chinese. Don't be intimidated by them. You need to know 2000 or so, but 500 are rather elementary like 月火水木金土日, another 500 are understandable or "fun" combinations, like 拐 which is 'hand' + 'mouth' + 'sword' = 'kidnap'. So about half are learnable with rather minimal effort. The other half are harder, but by studying 10 a night you can master them in ~ 3 months.

When I was taking Japanese in college the kanji were introduced haphazardly and I didn't grok them and hated them, but once in Japan I buckled down and lucked into finding a good book that, while flawed, made the kanji accessible and tackleable (?).

Anyhoo, the Reader's Digest version of my answer is going to be that given the macro situation I think going forward Mandarin is the best choice. I chose Japanese in 1989 because China was still closed and Japan had all the cool stuff, plus the 80s were the Japanese people's decade in the sun.

The way things are going now, including Japan's rather dire demographic pressures, I think this century is going to be China's for the taking.

Difficulty-wise, so far I've found Japanese to be orders of magnitude easier than Chinese. Mandarin is a language of homophones, and the sounds DO NOT overlap that much with English-speakers, so you have to start over as a baby as far as speaking goes. And, My God, pīnyīn, the romanization system of Chinese, is a freaking PITA. Note ī's in pīnyīn, Chinese has 4 tones, and different vowel tones changes the meaning of the words you are saying. pìnyin, pǐnyin, pìnyìn can (and do for all I know) mean different things!

Japanese, on the other hand, is about 80% sound-compatible with English (almost a strict subset), except, interestingly enough, for the CHINESE-derived sounds the have -- eg. "ryokan", "inn", has a tongue-twirl in there somewhere that I have yet to master after years of daily effort.

Japanese also has a homophone issue, but, again, that's only evident with the CHINESE-derived vocabulary (words with sounds like SHO, SHU, KYU, KYO, RYU, RO, etc etc have several, if not tens, of different Chinese readings since Chinese is a language of homophones.

FWIW, I've found Chinese to be TONS easier than my classmates since I already have a leg up knowing the kanji. If you have the time I recommend taking a year of Japanese first, clear the 1000 or so elemental kanji they will teach you (plus do self-study), then take 2nd year Japanese while taking first-year Mandarin.

I was thinking about Arabic for a career thing, but living and working in the Arabic-speaking world has as much attraction now as living in China did in the 80s.

So, my advice: Japanese for fun, and Chinese for profit.
posted by troy at 10:21 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Unless you have a really rigorous undergraduate language program, four semesters of introductory language without constant out of class reinforcement won't get you anywhere. Not that it wouldn't be educational or enjoyable.

I TOTALLY disagree with this. Two years of Japanese class gave me the necessary foundation and ability to hit the ground running in Japan coming out of college. Language, in the end, is an lifelong effort of SELF-STUDY, but having good teachers teaching you the basics to start you out is worth the time and investment. Without a certain level of proficiency, a foreign language is a undifferentiable mess, but with the basics, learning is a LOT easier.
posted by troy at 10:26 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

including Japan's rather dire demographic pressures, I think this century is going to be China's for the taking.

hmm, then again, Japan's lack of bodies coming out of the schools might make employment coming out of college more possible for you, compared with competing in China with its 1.3 billion annual college graduates.

One of my suspicions, which is partially why I am taking Mandarin now, is that the Japanese are just going to have to start living and working more closely with its continental neighbors. Now that WW2 is falling out of living memory I think this is more possible, and I think the Japanese are amenable to the idea of offshoring their "3K" work (kitsui, kiken, kitanai -- high-pressure, dangerous, dirty). Plus I think the Japanese will have to start importing Chinese workers to take care of their aging population, assuming their robot research direction fails as badly as their "fourth-generation" computer research effort did in the 80s.
posted by troy at 10:37 PM on October 24, 2008

I TOTALLY disagree with this. Two years of Japanese class gave me the necessary foundation and ability to hit the ground running in Japan coming out of college. Language, in the end, is an lifelong effort of SELF-STUDY, but having good teachers teaching you the basics to start you out is worth the time and investment. Without a certain level of proficiency, a foreign language is a undifferentiable mess, but with the basics, learning is a LOT easier.

I agree with all that, but my statement was that four semesters of Chinese isn't going to get you anywhere in terms of usefulness for a job. I stand by the idea that if he thinks he's *only* going to do the four semesters, then he should try an easier language like Spanish. If he loves languages, wants to make a lifetime investment, blah, blah, then any language is an option. But the OP suggests he or she wants the language that will be the most likely to use for a job after four semesters. Unless the OP is a language savant, he won't be able to use Japanese in a professional context from just university study. With only four semesters of Spanish, he'd be able to muddle through a business meeting, write notes about topics more advanced than just the weather, do all sorts of stuff that would be miles away if he studies Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic.
posted by bluejayk at 10:53 PM on October 24, 2008

^ yeah, coming out of college I wasn't hirable into a Japanese-only situation, but getting this base got my foot in the door (teaching English, natch) that I could leverage with self-study and the general experience of immersion into a pro position later that decade.
posted by troy at 11:01 PM on October 24, 2008

Think broader. Try studying linguistics. There is a huge demand for linguists that have computer programming skills, or programmers with linguistics skills, and there are very few people that have both. With at least a basic understanding of how languages work, and what the components are, you will be able to approach ANY language learning endeavor with a specialized skill set that will allow you to look at it from from a scientific framework (for example, I have found that knowing the IPA alone is incredibly valuable...if I want to learn a language, the first thing I look up is the IPA. Then it's the syntax word order, next the morphology structures. YMMV).

If you absolutely must acquire a foreign language in lieu of linguistic study, consider taking a non-indo-european language. That will expose you to a completely different way of looking at things and framing the world, which can only help you later.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:18 AM on October 25, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Anecdotal evidence from working in the programming industry and noticing relative quantities of translation work: The most work seems to be in Chinese, Spanish, French and German. Probably in roughly that order.
posted by MaxK at 1:27 AM on October 25, 2008

From someone who studies/has studied a lot of languages, including Mandarin and Japanese, is an engineer, and knows/works with lots of CS people:

Japanese: Japan's day may on top of Asia/the world may be past, but the country is a) still strong in technology and R&D b) does not (domestically) attract the brightest minds to computers and engineering right now. So, a lot of the IT and programming jobs are available to foreigners in ways that other jobs are not. Even if you aren't that literate, you can work here.
Chinese: Obvious growing market. Lots of your colleagues in the US probably come from China. Growth is ongoing (contrast with Japan).
Arabic: I don't see this fittting into CS that well, like someone above mentioned. I'm sure it's still a cool language.
posted by whatzit at 2:22 AM on October 25, 2008

I would recommend Mandarin, Spanish or Hindi.

Mandarin - for the obvious reason of the rapidly expanding global presence of China. Mandarin is actually very easy to learn as a spoken language. The grammar is much simpler than English. I would suggest not learning the writing system if you only have 4 semesters. And btw, the characters are not pictograms as someone said above - they are logograms. If you were interested in learning the writing system I would strongly suggest reading The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John De Francis first to avoid falling into common misconceptions about the Chinese writing system.

Hindi - again their expanding global presence and more specifically their greater presence in the world of computing than China. Here I would suggest learning the writing system (Devanagari) as well. Simply because there is profound linguistic knowledge* behind this writing system that will significantly increase your understanding of the language.

Spanish - it is my and many others professional opinion that Free and Open Source Software will continue to expand its role in the software universe. South American countries are strongly embracing this approach and there are already many strong contributers to FOSS projects from these countries. You might like to consider Portuguese (Brazil) instead.

* Pāṇini's 4th C BCE grammar of Sanskrit is considered a masterpiece by both linguists and computer scientists for its insights into both disciplines. There are many computer science papers that reference his grammar. His grammar has shown to be Turing Machine equivalent.
posted by Sitegeist at 3:57 AM on October 25, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Two questions : Do you have a girlfriend whose a native speaker? Do you plan on living there?

Some people have the dedication & skill for learning any language. But most lack one or both. I know one American guy who learned Chinese because he had Chinese girlfriends, indeed displayed fetish like obsession with Asian women. But most American's I know who know another language well have live abroad.

Spanish, French, German, etc. are all far far easier than Asian languages. I'd say pick one based on your study abroad opportunities and spend a year studying abroad.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:05 AM on October 25, 2008

Oh, French might become more important if Africa starts developing, but this sounds quite some time off, nor can you be sure they'll develop technically like India.

German's only advantage is the similarity to various European languages, but all from countries where most people speak English. However, you should still consider it if you have a grand parent that speaks.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:13 AM on October 25, 2008

I took Arabic at UofM like, ohmygod, 15 yrs ago already. The program is or was at the time the instructional system adopted by the State department, and the author of the system taught some of the courses. Raji Rammuny was his name - you could check if he is still there. I don't know if it would be right for you - there are lots of jobs for expats working in the Gulf, so there's that - but the program itself is strong.

UM also offers Bahasa Indonesia, which is cool in that I don't think that's a very common language offering. You could then converse with our next president!
posted by BinGregory at 6:20 AM on October 25, 2008

Oh look, he's still there!
posted by BinGregory at 7:00 AM on October 25, 2008

Two questions : Do you have a girlfriend whose a native speaker? Do you plan on living there?

No, and no, but hopefully will get a chance to get out of this country for some form of compsci experience in [insert country of language here].

From the looks of the answers here, Mandarin Chinese would be a good choice. If I ever end up heading for Japan, I have heard from some pretty credible sources that English is spoken A LOT to their frustration (in trying to learn to speak Japanese fluently). China is a country I have had a lot of curiosity about though...

Thanks for the answers once again!
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:44 AM on October 25, 2008

Spanish, French, German, etc. are all far far easier than Asian languages

Having taken French (in elementary school), German (9th grade), Spanish (10th & 11th), and Japanese in college for two years, I've gotta disagree with this.

Japanese, with its grammatical particles, lack of countable nouns, lack of noun gender, simplification of verb tenses and lack of verb agreement rules (eg. "is/are"), strong presence of katakana loan words (an English speaker already knows thousands of words in Japanese) is an amazingly logical and efficient language.

The kanji make it it challenging to many people, but the serious student can tackle them in a summer -- just 20 a day to learn to recognize their basic meanings.
posted by troy at 11:52 AM on October 25, 2008

Another viewpoint is to think of the language's utility in your work, even if you never had to use it to communicate with a speaker. As some have said, in Japan you are likely to get by in computing business situations because they will speak better English than you speak Japanese. And in most European countries you will get by OK, too.

On this basis I would suggest either German or Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese/other east Asian language.

German because (just my own experience, so anecdotal) there is a lot of archived technical discussion available on Google that's in German. Germany has a large technically literate population -- a lot of people who had broadband early -- and a lot of Linux people. A of what they've talked about and still talk about is archived. I have found a small bit of German useful on more than one occasion when I was only getting German hits in search engines. Of course, you can use translation tools.

Japanese etc. for being familiar to any degree with the detail (even just syntactic) of a language which forces you, due to the sheer number of characters that must be represented from its alphabet, to deal with internationalization issues when writing applications to support it. Familiarity with Unicode and how well different languages, libraries and OSes deal with it is a useful skill. You can learn these things without understanding anything about east Asian languages but I think a little knowledge could only help (I don't have it).

Not only that, but if you ever work somewhere where you have to repeat a bug in a Japanese/Chinese etc. OS, you will be thankful of knowing a few words. Especially if those words are OK, Cancel, etc.
posted by galaksit at 1:21 PM on October 25, 2008

In case you're still reading:

If I ever end up heading for Japan, I have heard from some pretty credible sources that English is spoken A LOT to their frustration (in trying to learn to speak Japanese fluently).
TRUE. This is even worse when you're a beginner than when you are at a level to hold your own in conversations (because obviously you need to get past the former level to get to the latter). BUT a) knowing Japanese does make people easier to talk to, because many people know a lot of words in English but can't make a basic sentence in conversation and b) daily life things of course - there seems to be an unwritten rule that the more important something is, the less likely it is to be offered in a non-Japanese language.

Mandarin Chinese would be a good choice.
Yay on your choice. Also, from my experience, there's better success for those using Chinese reading skills to piece together Japanese communication than the other way around, when they only know one of the two. You can (anecdotally) add that to your good reasons to take Chinese list.
posted by whatzit at 8:12 PM on October 25, 2008

Speaking as someone who has studied/been around Chinese for 10 years, I'd first like to disabuse you of the idea that learning Chinese is a monetarily profitable venture. If you're only going to take 4 semesters of it (as I understand your question), you'll be able to have simple conversations but you won't be anywhere near being able to read technical documentation.

In strict marginal cost/marginal benefit terms, you'd be MUCH better off doing something else with your time.
posted by alidarbac at 8:36 PM on October 25, 2008

I just wanted to jump in and say that Japanese isn't cornering the market on fun languages to learn. I only took two semesters of Mandarin, but found it immensely enjoyable and can still recognize basic conversational phrases--contrast this with four years of high school French, of which I remember almost nothing (Least you say that this is because I took French a longer time ago, my knowledge evaporated almost immediately. Lack of interest and bad teachers had just about everything to do with this). In fact, I've been looking up Chinese language schools to continue my studies--although you're not going to become fluent in two years, it's your interest, and not the time spent in the class room, that's really going to determine your eventual fluency in a language.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:26 AM on October 27, 2008

As a UofM alum, who also transferred in, I have a couple thoughts for you, depending on your background and desires:

If you just want to get it out of the way, I was able to completely test out of the language requirement by taking the final exam of the 4th semester course. In my case, I'd had spanish in high school and the first 2 years of college and tested into the 4th semester at UofM. There was NO way I would have passed that class, as I was good and reading/writing, but very bad at hearing/speaking. It was a long shot, but it worked out for me. If you already have background in a language, it might be worth a shot. It'll save you 4 classes worth of time, energy, and possibly money.

However, you actually seem excited about learning a new language, and more power to you! With that in mind, focus on languages that are spoken in places where "low-cost design centers" are likely to be located. I have experienced these locations to be: India, Poland, Argentina, China, Singapore. There are certainly others, these are just my experiences in the 7ish years since I got a "real" job. :)
posted by specialnobodie at 12:09 PM on October 27, 2008

Just a note- I took Japanese at U of M during my summers (they have an intensive program- 1 year in 10 weeks) and the program is great. Whatever you decide to do though you pretty much cant go wrong there. lots of strong programs.

Also- 2 years (or the equivalent) is enough to be conversational in Japanese. I had that much when I went to Japan to study and minus vocabulary I had sufficient grammar to make it happen.
posted by zennoshinjou at 7:45 AM on October 28, 2008