Which Foreign Language Should I Learn?

[osnarf]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to decide on which foreign language i should learn. My requirement is filled from high school,although I don't remember a thing from it, and I didn't really learn that much to begin with anyways (I could have simple, very slowly spoken conversations).

I hear that a foreign language isn't as necessary these days as it was before from searching the forum, but I would still like to be at least bilingual, and I think it would be a bit eye-opening and insightful into another culture.

Now, I don't have any particular preference. I've always been fascinated by the way German sounds when it is spoken. I'm Italian, so I feel like I should be able to converse in Italian. France is also a place I might like to visit, and is the language I took in high school (so what I did know should come back fairly easily).

So my question is what, if any, specialized areas in physics, math, or engineering, have had particularly large contributions from people in anyone language (or were most of them written in latin)? I think it would be nice to be able to read great works in the original language.

 

[chiro]

Hey there.

For the subjects of math and physics, I would recommend either Russian or German. Aside from some key figures like Gauss, Hilbert, Kolmogorov, and others, if you become well versed in one of these languages, you will get to see a different perspective from very great talent in mathematics.

One of my previous lecturers told me about the Russian school of mathematics and he commented that it was good but suggested for me to instead read the AMS books and related journals.

For physics there is an interesting guy by the name of Konstantin Meyl who has published a tonne of stuff in scalar electromagnetics and some of the stuff he was written is in German only. He has published the more common books in english and its a pretty interesting read however I'm not a physics major (math major) so maybe some people might give better suggestions for physics and/or engineering.

As you probably know most findings, expositions, monologues and so forth are published in English thankfully, but I have heard in (some) universities in the states that they require graduate students (in math) to be fluent to a degree so that they can read and analyze papers in another language. I don't know if its true or not, but it will probably be an advantage especially if you want to survey mainstream ideas and thought processes not common in the west.

Good luck!

 

[sintomi]

What about italian?