Which Asian language should I learn (first) to advance my career?

Question

I'd like to hear your opinions on this:

I work for a large international company, and have worked for them in 4 different countries now. My language skills have helped a lot with that (7 spoken, 9 written), and I want to build on that in order to advance my career. I'm planning to learn Mandarin and Japanese, and eventually perhaps Korean. I can't learn all three at the same time, but I'm unsure which one I ought to tackle first. 

Mandarin is the most difficult of them and will likely take the longest to learn, but with rapidly expanding Chinese markets and growing economy I think it can only be beneficial to get a head-start and aim to be fairly fluent by the time my company will expand to China in a few years. I have no problem with the tones and I'm good with pronunciation, so that doesn't scare me much, but I'm aware that it will take me quite some time to read and write sufficiently to represent my company's interests locally.

Japanese is very easy to pronounce for me, and the characters aren't such a huge challenge as Mandarin either, but career-wise it would only be second choice. Our office in Tokyo is currently very small and I have a number of co-workers who are already fluent in Japanese (and familiar with the culture etc), so it would be difficult to out-shine all of them to score one of of the rare jobs in Japan.

Korean is last on the list, at least as far as career-moves are concerned. I have a strong personal interest in Korea, and I find the characters and grammar very logic and thus relatively easy to learn, but it will not help me with my current job in any way. On the other hand, I would not rule out changing company or even career in the future. I might eventually like to live and work in S.Korea for a while - and learning something you love certainly makes you learn even faster and better, right?

Strictly thinking about work/career, what is your opinion on this? What would you do given the points above?

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

You basically answered the question yourself. Korean is last on the list, Japanese is second, and even though Mandarin seems hard (Trust me, it's not that bad, you just let the characters get to you...Although they can be a pain in the *** sometimes) Business-wise and time-wise (trust me, you'll have it in no time) Mandarin would be the most wise of choices to learn first.

Anonymous · Answer

I think you can't have it both ways. Either you become a polyglot and work in tourism, or you learn a few languages well (including a specialisation) so you can become a translator(written text) or interpreter (spoken language). In the latter case you always work from a second language into your native one. Arabic, Korean and Japanese are considered very hard for native speakers of english, and will require 2200 hours each to just reach fluency. Spanish or French require 600 hours each. Esperanto requires 150. (see wikipedia Propaedeutic_value_of_esperanto ) For being a translator, knowing languages is not enough. You need to have studied something else, preferably in both languages you work with, so you can do translations that home-and-garden bilinguals cannot do

Anonymous · Answer

What's the point of adding Japanese to the list as a career choice that probably won't advance your career anyway. You might as well invest the time in learning Mandarin.

Anonymous · Answer

Mandarin

Junko Matsumoto · Answer

Mandarin is the fastest growing language and will probably help you the most in almost all careers.

? · Answer

Mandarin, its the most widely spoken by far

Anonymous · Answer

learn Chinese...

Which Asian language should I learn (first) to advance my career?

7 Answers