Wil you be specifying a Native American speaker for that? 
I think with English and Chinese youāre okay careerwise. I would choose the next one on the basis of whichever you think would be the most fun. I think Japanese or Korean would be extremely enjoyable once you get past the grammar as you would pick up new vocabulary very, very quickly (Japanese for obvious reasons and you might be surprised to know that about 70% of Korean vocabulary has Chinese roots).
Spanish would also be fun on the above basis but youāre so far removed from the areas where it is spoken that you might quickly wonder when the hell youāll ever get the chance to use it.
[quote=āHuang Guang Chenā]With commerce and Chinese up your sleeve, why not Japanese? The Japanese economy is back big time and with the Chinese you are already some way there with the kanji.
HG[/quote]
That was my logic; accept the other way around 
Japanese is a pretty cool language, I must sayā¦
I live in Australia and plan to go into international trade or something like that. Did have wild hopes of becoming a diplomatā¦well, weāll see about that. [/quote]
DFAT donāt take people because of language skills necessarily. That take engineers lawyers arts business and any degree you excelled in.
My twin sister is still there doing computer hardware and software systems and my Uncle was there too for awhile, till he retired.
I worked in DFAT and did my language training in Malay at Point Cook RAAF Base.
Being a dipshit aint itās all cracked up to be. 
But do it for awhile then leave like many and youāll find a pretty good career outside of DFAT in private industry.
Learn THAI or VIETNAMESE if you plan to do business in Asia.
Mandarin, English, and Thai.
Mandarin, English and Vietnamese.
Donāt waste your time with Japanese.
Spanish is a nice choice, too.
Really? Thai or Viet? Hmm . . . Why? I like Vietmanese (deliberate, itās the way racists invariably pronounce Vietnamese) and Iām learning Thai - all too slowly unfortunately, but I wouldnāt think of either as particularly useful just yet.
HG
Yeahā¦thatās what people said about Chinese in the 70s!
Thai or Vietnamese is the Chinese of 2006: 15 years from now, you will wish you had studied it.
Ooh! Iām so forward looking. Got Chinese up while everyone else was doing Jap and nnow Iām moving onto Thai. Dang but Iām slick . . . Doh! Hang on, why aint I rich? 
HG
Thanks guys for your replies!
Seems like Spanish is a pretty popular choiceā¦and it just makes making a choice even harder!
Cosā Iām double majoring in the Arts degree, thought having any language to go with politics would be really interestingā¦and the more I think about it, there seems to be this realisation that German is what Iām really interested in learning right now (I was or still am just waiting for someone to come up with something that would convince me otherwise), or maybe I would just love to go on exchange to Germany and speak the native language.
Having spent quite a few horrible years relearning the basics of French thanks to those new beginner students every year, I can just grasp basic convo and reading, even manage to conjugate irregular verbs (woohoo) but Iāve since lost all interest in that romantic language and also developed a thought that goes something along the lines of āSpanish is a romantic language and rumoured to be much easierā¦Iāll just learn it as a 4th language!ā
Yesā¦I overestimate my capabilities, but languages are cool 
Ah, French irregular verbs. I remember in 8th grade when I made the acquaintance of MRS RD VANDERTRAMP. I was actually excited to be learning something ādifficultā. Seems like kidās play compared to having to reading frickinā Balzac and āGargantuaā in la langue originale.
God I hated Gargantua. Actually, I hated all of my French Lit courses, despite loving almost all of my other courses in French. My memories of them seem trippy as if I only watched all 18 months of the torture happening to someone else without really partipating. Probably because I never read any of the books (or at least not in French if I could find the English version) and spent most of the time in class doodling and staring out the window, trying not to cringe visibly at my classmatesā horrible accents and grammar (or more accurately, lack thereof).
Yeah, Spanish sounds good.
I would go for Yiddish, Inuktitut (inuit), and DoubleSpeak.
As you can tell, my language/career tie-in is pretty non-existant. Unless of course I become a wise-cracking verbose Minister of Propaganda for the Peopleās Popular Front of Portly Inuit.
Zulu is by far the most interesting language Iāve studied. My mom is fluent, and used to teach it at the university, and I studied it a bit at school and for a year at university. I was really interested, so I picked it up pretty quickly, but couldnāt continue because of requirements for other courses for my majors, and now Iāve forgotten a lot because I never practised. Iām definitely studying it again though when Iām back in South Africa, Iād love to get fluent, especially as Iām really into Zulu history as well.
I also need to learn Spanish, as my next teaching english stop will be somewhere in South America, sometime in the future after Iāve got that masterās degree under my beltā¦
For anyone else, whatever language you choose to learn should pretty much depend on when and how often you can use it. Simple as that. Of course, some people may have interests in exotic languages which are only spoken in far off regions of the world, and more power to you if youāre into learning the language that the this-and-that tribe uses in the depths of the Amazon rain forest. Just donāt be too disappointed when you forget it all because of lack of practical application and practice opportunities.
If you are thinking ahead to a PHd, both German and Japanese make good research languages. German ties in nicely with studying linguistics and Japanese is great for comparison with Chinese.
Of course, if youāre looking for utility for conversations, Spanish is a fine choice. But keep in mind the number of Spanish speakers who will also speak good English. I would expect Japanese would be more essential to learn for communication purposes.
Or, if you want to be a CIA triple-threat, choose either Arabic or Korean. Those are the languages a lot of government agencies are after.
There is going to be an enormous amount of German-China business coming up in the near future.
One of my friends is a professional interpretorā¦heās one of those guys who gets the high-paid, high-pressure gigs with governments and multi-nationalsā¦and he has recently been on a number of Chinese-English gigs where the foreign company was actually German.
In what way?
I think if I were in Australia Iād be thinking Indonesian/ Malay. Huge numbers of speakers and right next door.
[quote=ātrapjawā]Zulu is by far the most interesting language Iāve studied. My mom is fluent, and used to teach it at the university, and I studied it a bit at school and for a year at university. I was really interested, so I picked it up pretty quickly, but couldnāt continue because of requirements for other courses for my majors, and now Iāve forgotten a lot because I never practised. Iām definitely studying it again though when Iām back in South Africa, Iād love to get fluent, especially as Iām really into Zulu history as well.
I also need to learn Spanish, as my next teaching English stop will be somewhere in South America, sometime in the future after Iāve got that masterās degree under my beltā¦
For anyone else, whatever language you choose to learn should pretty much depend on when and how often you can use it. Simple as that. Of course, some people may have interests in exotic languages which are only spoken in far off regions of the world, and more power to you if youāre into learning the language that the this-and-that tribe uses in the depths of the Amazon rain forest. Just donāt be too disappointed when you forget it all because of lack of practical application and practice opportunities.[/quote]
One of my majors is Xhosa, a language closely related to Zulu. I did it as a third language and tried to teach it for a while, but I found my students were much more fluent at it than myself and gave up. However, I can follow most day-to-day conversations and express myself quite clearly.
Iām also interested in Nguni History. Khoisan history also interests me, especially that of the Griqua.
You must be from the Cape then, rinkhalsā¦ Iām a KwaZulu-Natal boy, hence the Zulu thingā¦ And after watching John Ross and Shaka Zulu on TV as a little kid (the sangoma scared the hell out of meā¦ used to have nightmares about her, LOL) the seeds were planted for my interest today. That, and visiting the Anglo-Zulu war battlefields (Isandlwana is the eeriest place Iāve ever been), but anyway, this is totally :offtopic: so Iāll stopā¦
In what way?
I think if I were in Australia Iād be thinking Indonesian/ Malay. Huge numbers of speakers and right next door.[/quote]
For one, a lot of good research papers are written in German. For another, knowledge of German is really good for doing comparisons with English as they are both from the Germanic language family.
In all sincerity, I have found Esperanto to be one of the easiest, most useful, and most life-changing languages I have ever studied.
Think about all the languages people start, but never really learn to speak in. And if you do, youāll still never be āone of themā so long as you live, probably. But you CAN be one of us! (Like, really fast.)
If I bump into another English speaker, Iāll say hi. But if itās an Esperanto speaker, itās like being a fellow Mason or something! Wouldnāt you like to be part of an international brotherhood? Like joining a cult that doesnāt care what you believe! Anyway, check it out. (Otherwise, thereās always Klingonā¦)
esperanto.net
esperanto.org
lernu.com
internacia.tv (We have TV now! Major cultural milestoneā¦)
gxangalo.com (and a newspaper)