Bilingual in Europe versus USA

Dave Frightens Me wrote:
On 24 Aug 2006 11:21:12 -0700, "Iceman" wrote:

Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and maybe Arabic or Russian
are more valuable than French or German. And even many universities
don't offer all of those languages.

Chinese is next to useless, coz it's extremely difficult to master,
and even by the Chinese is seen as an inferior language. Chances are
you will never need it in the business or social world.

You have to be totally fluent in Chinese before it is any commercial
use - but people who are fluent and who have law, business, IT, etc.
skills are in huge demand.

Japanese comes in a number of flavours, but is only used in Japan. Even there, you
don't really need it to do business.

That used to be true, but the job market over there has gotten much
tougher, and now Westerners basically need Japanese to do anything in
Tokyo other than teach English or strip.

And Portuguese is only of value in Portugal and Brazil.

But Brazil is a huge market, and there are far fewer
Portuguese-speakers in the US than Spanish-speakers. And it isn't the
huge pain in the ass to learn that the Asian languages or Arabic are.

Russian may be useful, but you would have to
be commited to wanted to deal with the Russians. I don't know anyone
who has learnt Arabic, but again, it's not a part of the world you are
likely to want to go to. In the UAE it's pretty much all English!

Yes, but most long-term jobs in the UAE would expect Arabic. I don't
know if they generally require 100% fluency, but they probably require
at least strong conversational Arabic.

In summation, there really isn't an obvious second language to learn
in the world, unless you want to move to a specific place.

Well, in my field, law, and in the closely related field, finance,
there is a lot of demand for people who speak those languages to be
based out of New York or London, and only make occasional trips to
China, Brazil, Russia, etc. Even a lot of Western professionals who
are "in region" are based out of cities like Dubai or Hong Kong rather
than Cairo or Guangzhou.

It's clearly not for everyone, and you have to be willing to put in the
work to become totally fluent in a difficult language and to make
repeated trips to developing countries. But for someone who does have
an interest in those countries or cultures, fluency in one of those
languages is far more of a commercial advantage than fluent French or
German would be.