Interpreters and Conference Interpreting

hi everyone, I speek French (mother tongue) and German (at first) and English! I would like to learn an other language but I don't know which one.. I hear a lot about Russian or eastern languages but is it really possible to speek perfectly Russian, Chinese, or Lithuanian?? Maybe it is better to speek a good Spanish than a poor language even rare..
what do you think about it??
thanks

Hi there!

Now, which language is "better" is difficult to say. It depends on many things.

Russian and Chinese are the thing to work in the UN. Do you like the cities where there are UN HQ's? Do you like Russian and Chinese culture?

Lithuanian and Spanish will take you to Brussels. Do you like it? Do you like Spanish or Lithuanian culture?

Those should be your thoughts, more than anything else. No matter how "useful" a language is, if you lack the motivation or despise the culture, you won't learn them.

But try to aim for languages from international organizations, yeah.

That said, speaking them perfectly is probably to difficult an objective, perfection is a divine thing, not a human one.

But you can learn them well enough to interpret. I did, with Russian. Took me 8 years, but if you are serious ( I wasn't) you can do it in less.

fanny wrote:hi everyone, I speek French (mother tongue) and German (at first) and English! I would like to learn an other language but I don't know which one.. I hear a lot about Russian or eastern languages but is it really possible to speek perfectly Russian, Chinese, or Lithuanian?? Maybe it is better to speek a good Spanish than a poor language even rare..
what do you think about it??
thanks

Hi

if you are just thinking about learning a language for fun, or the challenge, then any thing that interests you is good. But if it is with a view to interpreting, then Dawncloak is right. Think about your future markets. The obvious one for you, from what you say, is to add an EU language to your DE and EN and aim for Brussels. Lithuanian is spoken fairly rarely though, as it is a small country. You might like to think about a "bigger" language. Italian, Spanish from the older EU languages, Polish or Romanian from the new ones.
For interpreting purposes (at the UN and EU) you, as a French native, will not be working into a foreign language, so how well you speak it is irrelevant. It is all about how well you understand and interpret from a language. And that can be done, even from difficult rare languages.

Alternatively... you want to work RU-FR or Chinese-Fr in both directions. But then your German will be of much less professional use to you. And you are probably looking at a 6-10 year project with 3 years or more in the country of the language.

Andy