BOFH wrote:Esperanto is not limited to Europe in any way. It has a notable presence in 120 countries via The Universal Esperanto Association..

I'll bet the Klingon Language Institute reckons their language has a notable presence throughout the world, too.

prahkeitouj wrote:How about Esperanto?
I think learning a language we have to have a goal.
I want to study English, Thai , Chinese and Fench.

I have heard of this language, but have never wanted to learn it.

Chinese.

Spanish is useless in Asia, as is French. It's over.

Korean, Japanese, Russian, maybe if you intend to study/ work there.

On a serious note Samouth, I agree with Vladimir.

However, in choosing a language, your friends should always consider what is the current lingua franca (English) or the future lingua franca (Mandarin?, etc. ). You may not have to consider moving to said country to learn her language if they have multinational corporations worldwide; I have many Polish friends that have learned Japanese and Korean in Poland and have been hired by Japanese and Korean firms.

Samouth, whatever language they choose, immerse 100% and maybe find a boyfriend/girlfriend that will force them to use that language. It really helps a great deal IMHO.

@StroppyChops: Klingon? I spent years learning Quenya and kept all my computer file names in Quenyan and I was into LARPing. Talk about being loner nerd. Actually I still keep my files and folders in Quenyan or Sindarin.

More people will speak Chinese, the problem is that Chinese is WAY more difficult to learn than English, around 5 years for writing, whereas one can learn passable pidgin in 6 months

When you're doing business, time is money

vladimir wrote:More people will speak Chinese, the problem is that Chinese is WAY more difficult to learn than English, around 5 years for writing, whereas one can learn passable pidgin in 6 months

When you're doing business, time is money

I have studied Chinese for one day and i found it so hard so i gave up. Plus i really don't like this language. More and more of Cambodians are learning Chinese and hoping they will get good jobs as more and more investments of Chinese in Cambodia.

For me i wouldn't learn other languages for works. I think knowing English is enough, even though many Cambodians speak really good English. I like how it sounds when people speak French and that's why i wanted to learn it as well as German.

Therapist wrote:On a serious note Samouth, I agree with Vladimir.

However, in choosing a language, your friends should always consider what is the current lingua franca (English) or the future lingua franca (Mandarin?, etc. ). You may not have to consider moving to said country to learn her language if they have multinational corporations worldwide; I have many Polish friends that have learned Japanese and Korean in Poland and have been hired by Japanese and Korean firms.

Samouth, whatever language they choose, immerse 100% and maybe find a boyfriend/girlfriend that will force them to use that language. It really helps a great deal IMHO.

@StroppyChops: Klingon? I spent years learning Quenya and kept all my computer file names in Quenyan and I was into LARPing. Talk about being loner nerd. Actually I still keep my files and folders in Quenyan or Sindarin.

Yeah. I also think that learning Chinese is a good ideas and will be really practical in the future, however as BOFH said, you will not learn anything if you don't like it and i do agree with him. I don't like Chinese and i don't think i would one day be able to speak it even thought i learned it.

Yes. Phnom Penh is a great place to learn the language and it is really cheap. I really don't have to go those countries to learn their language and i also don't think i can afford to do it. I just talked to one of my friend the other about her French class. She just joined a beginner class of French a month ago and it is really cheap. It is only 8 dollar per month for 1 hour a day and 5 day a week. she wanted me to study with her.

While learning Mandarin has minor benefits - anyone stupid enough to believe it will one day be a "lingua franca" is really stupid. There's a reason 300 million Chinese people are currently learning English and it's not in the expectation of the world learning Mandarin. It takes far too long to learn to read and write Mandarin (most Chinese are only just about there by the time they leave school... and even then they only learn about 30% of the written language). The deal has been done and for international business - English is the language. The interesting thing will be to see how this will work as English evolves in different directions in different places (it's estimated that within 300 years British and American variants of English will be so far evolved from each other - they will be no longer mutually intelligible). And before you Yanks get too smug about the American variant winning out... you might want to remember the 1 billion or so Indian folks who speak British English and will be one of the world's superpowers in the not too distant future.