Foreign Language for Graduate School

[spb]

Hello all, particularly graduate students and PhDs,

I'm planning on learning a foreign language, mostly for fun, but I would like to learn a language used by many of my colleagues in mathematics programs. I've not yet entered graduate school (for mathematics, of course), so I was wondering what the general demographics were for said programs. The obvious choice would seem to be a Chinese dialect, but Vietnamese also stands out as being useful here. Which of those would you recommend? Would you recommend another? I know a lot of mathematics research has been done in Russia and Germany, but I think I want to learn a language to speak, not to learn.

Thank you,
-spb

 

[Monocles]

Many (maybe even most?) graduate level math programs require you to learn either German, French, or Russian. So, I'd recommend one of those.