Best Foreign Language to Learn for I-banking/Consulting?

I thought Mandarin would be a good idea, but it was too difficult to take as a college class. Maybe I'll try to learn more on my own later.

Mandarin Chinese,German, Korean,Spanish, or Japanese would probably be much more useful than either french or hindi.

If you're talking about a language that'll make recruiting easier for banking, Japanese and Mandarin are tops.

If you know Japanese, you will get interviews with tokyo and probably the offer just bc of a lack of qualified people from the US applying.

Mandarin isn't as much of a shoo-in, but I saw people with 3.2's at Penn getting interviews with literally every bank in HK bc of their reading and writing ability.

Consulting isn't anything as clear-cut, but the Asia offices are easier to get a job from, but speaking the language is a prerequisite I believe(though not sure about this one)

I already know mandarin and cantonese.. should I now go for Japanese or German?

and think of Portuguese as a relatively add on once you've mastered Spanish. That way you have Latin/South America covered. I speak French, useful in Ldn at times, but there are so many French people in the City here that it kind of negates your advantage.

mandarin is tops. u would have to read and speak it fluently (native tongue). my friend from a junior college(yes, thats right) landed a position in HK w/ DB because he passed cfa level 1 and knows mandarin.

These comments better be true because I am native in Mandarin and Cantonese!

Don't waste your time learning languages because you think an office will get a hard-on and give you an offer. Languages only matter if the office you are applying to regularly deals with clients in that language. Period. In NY, you will almost always do business in English. Period. You know Swahili? Awesome! Are you going to be working in the Horn of Africa? No? Then no one fucking cares.

Decide which offices you are interested in working at, and learn the languages necessary to communicate with clients accordingly.

So how difficult is it to learn Mandarin at the college level?

im fluent in mandarin and im also learning german. does that mean its useless unless i apply for office in Germany?

Best languages to learn are those where fewer people are willing to use English as the language of business.

But then again, the question is too broad. It depends where you want to work.

Of course, if you work in Europe, learning something other than English will help, but even in Europe, you can get away with English at the CEO/CFO level in any EU country. And as a banker you're interacting with clients mostly at the executive level anyhow. Of course if you're a mgmt consultant it's a different story where you'll be dealing with more middle managers, ops staff, site workers, etc. where the local language is basically necessary. The one place that won't use as much English even at the exec level is Russia (so obviously that would be useful if you want to work there).

In the middle east, Arabic certainly helps, although you can get away with just English in most instances.

In Central and South America, Spanish (or Portuguese for Brazil) -- not sure if you can really get away with just English anymore though. Times may have changed there.

In Asia, English is the common business language in every country except for China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Learning to speak Tagalog, Bahasa, Malay, Thai, Hindi, etc. may get you some brownie points, but it's not essential. However, if you're banking with the Japanese, you need Japanese. With China and Taiwan, being fluent in Mandarin is practically a must now (the Chinese are becoming just as ethnocentric about their language/culture as the Americans are about theirs).

As for how hard it is to learn Mandarin -- learning to speak is actually a lot easier than you think (that's what many westerners who've learned it seemed to mention). The language is quite simple grammatically -- you don't conjugate verbs as they're all kept in the infinitive (i.e. "I be, you be, we be, they be" instead of "I am, you are"). There are no tenses ("I go now, I go later, I go before" instead of "I go, I will go, I went"). Pronouns aren't as rigidly distinguished. There are no adverbs. And the sentence structure is quite simple. The hardest part is getting the four tones -- but after that, it's actually not hard. You can pick up the spoken language a lot quicker than you realize.

That's why Chinese speakers who aren't fluent in English tend to have the most trouble with verbs (not conjugating), tenses (forgetting to use past tenses), adverbs (not using them at all), pronouns (confusing "he" with "she", "I" with "me", etc.) and sentence construction in English.

Where Mandarin gets deathly hard is learning to read and write. It's just sheer memorization. You need to know around 1,000 characters to be able to read street signs, menus, etc. You need to know at least 2,000 characters to be able to read newspapers comfortably. And you'll need probably 2,500-3,000+ to be able to read legal documents and more arcane stuff. I've read about a study a while back that it takes Chinese kids on average 2 extra years to become functionally literate in their own language compared to European/American kids.

Alex Chu
alex@mbaapply.com
www.mbaapply.com
http://mbaapply.blogspot.com

VBA.

I've been studying Mandarin seriously for about 2 years and by now I can pretty much wing my way through most situations (ordering food, chit chatting, picking up women). BUT I'm very very far from having the ability to carry an intelligent business conversation.

The tones, for me, were a big challenge. I thought I had a pretty good ear (was in choir for years), but Chinese made me feel completely tone deaf for about 6 months.

I had a head start on the character memorization since I had been studying Japanese for years prior as well.

I'd say if you want to learn Mandarin, better be prepared to commit to 3-4 years of serious daily study to get to a functional level. Given the nature of the language though, becoming truly FLUENT could be a lifelong process.

Now that I'm beginning to get sick of Asian languages (Korean would be waaay too big of a challenge to undertake now) I'm considering moving to something completely different such as Portuguese or French. I study languages because I think it's fun and interesting though, not because I think it will lead to some great job prospects.

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Mandarin seems to be the popular choice, and given the rise of East Asia and all it most certainly makes sense - however, you should keep in mind a few things if you decide to do it:

-As others have mentioned, any Asian language is going to have a much steeper learning curve than Western European languages... this is coming from someone who learned 2 Asian languages to reasonably high levels back in college and lived in Asia for a year

-You will be competing with lots of native speakers and it will be very, very difficult to match their levels without living in the country for awhile

-As others have mentioned, unless you want to work in a specific office/country, I think learning a language purely to give yourself an advantage in recruiting is not a good use of time. If you really like it and would learn it anyway, sure, go ahead, but it's not very effective to spend a ridiculous amount of time learning Mandarin just to boost your chances of getting into i-banking.

As I've written about on my site before and here on WSO, I think the Middle East is one region that is relatively overlooked vs. India/China... sure, Arabic/local languages are not always essential, but going forward I think it will be the next "hot" region to work in and so learning the appropriate languages with the goal of working there might be an interesting strategy.

http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/
Mergers & Inquisitions

well, since there's no clear-cut answer, how about we discuss then which one will pull in the hottest girls. And before I get flamed for being a misogynist, I was told as advice in a previous thread to get with as many women as possible, so I think the forum has spoken...

Banking: Chinese, French, German, Japanese

Girls: Are you actually trying to communicate with them or just impress them? French of course if you want to "sound" sexy. Portuguese and Italian if you want to communicate with the hottest women.