If English is your native (or near native) language, then studying another language will not do anything to help you get a job. Unfortunately many students believed the mirage of learning a language as a false gateway to riches in a distant land, and thought spending a year or two (which is really isn’t enough to learn Chinese or most languages anyway) upping their language skills would make them more marketable. In fact, it doesn’t.
U.S. students losing interest in China as dream jobs prove elusive
You will spend a year learning basic Chinese and then realize there are quite literally millions of Chinese people who not only are native speakers of Chinese, but also know English way better than your Chinese will ever hope to be (remember most of them have been studying English diligently since kindergarten). The logic of most corporations is to hire locals in China and other countries, and not import American or British expatriates who will cost more anyway. In addition, local employees in China and other countries count as diversity hires, which ticks off another box on the corporate social responsibility factoid sheets.
Don’t study a foreign language because you think it will get you a job. In fact, it won’t help you at all. And I can attest to that from personal experience as well. If you want to study a foreign language because you dream of reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian or understand Latin American cinema without subtitles, then that’s wonderful for your personal intellectualism. But don’t study a language under the delusion that it will help you get a leg up in the job market as you’ll only be disappointed.
mccarthyism.com 