Which Languages Useful for Engineering ?

[abdurresitcan]

I want would be Mechatronik Engineer so which languages useful ? Everybody say German,Chinese....

[Benta]

English, German should be enough to start with.

[Mechatrommer]

English for anything engineering. Arab for the Holy Book. if you have limited time, concentrate on those 2, if you have more time, Chinese because its going to be economy giant, if have more time, German so you can read some undocumented hack. but if you have to choose only one, then English.

[Jeroen3]

Chinese is only required when you're going for consumer electronics or outsourcing over there.

[Burczyk]

English is the most useful in my opinion.

[CatalinaWOW]

Agree with others on the top three.  If you are one of those who picks up languages easily there is good material in several others.  Russian, French and Japanese to name a few.

[schmitt trigger]

English is the Internet's lingua franca. You'll get the vast majority of your information with it.

There is quite some technical info in German also. I made an effort learning to read (only read) German, and I can tell you it has paid off.

Chinese............... My opinion is that it will become more and more important in the future. But of course learning the symbols is an order of magnitude more difficult than western characters.

[coppice]

English and Mandarin are the important languages to know going forwards. Japanese might be useful, but less so than a couple of decades ago. Any German with a decent education understands English, so speaking German is only a substantial benefit if you want to live there. Many other languages might be really valuable for you specially to know, but are hard to predict. For example, I suffered through French, German and Latin lessons at school, but the first foreign language I ever had a use for was Cantonese.

[Benta]

The OP wants to go into Mechatronics, meaning automotive. The number of text books and manuals available only in German is vast in this field, which is why I listed German as mandatory. English is a given, more or less.

[tkamiya]

I'd say English and Japanese, and that's what I speak.

I usually stick with English but when manuals for Japanese components translated into English often doesn't make sense.  In such cases, I look for the original manual in Japanese.  Because our written language is similar, I can make enough sense out of Chinese as well.

That said, most innovative stuff comes out of English speaking countries and Japan.  Often times, Chinese products are derivative of something existing.

[Benta]

You're all still missing the "mechatronics" part. Just sayin'. Chinese won't bring anything there.

[coppice]

As I've said before, most if not all young, formally higher educated Chinese people can understand English, all you need is to be able to understand Chinglish in the most unfortunate cases. If you can read Alibaba product descriptions, you are good to go.

Only a small percentage of people in China with a university level education understand English well enough to hold a simple conversation. Many of them feel pretty bad about this, as they all studied English from kindergarten to their last year at university. They are a lot better at answering an e-mail, because they can take their time with written communication. Also, a lot more of their education focussed on written, rather than verbal, English.

Life in Shenzhen or Shanghai can be very limiting if you can neither read Chinese or speak Mandarin. You can survive, but you can survive in most places if you have some money.

[0xdeadbeef]

Any German with a decent education understands English, so speaking German is only a substantial benefit if you want to live there.

True. One foreign language is mandatory in Germany and that's usually English (even though mine was Latin ). Still, it's really surprising how many English speaking people live here (Rhine-Main area) who expect to get a meaningful answer if they ask an elderly saleslady in a bakery if a certain slice contains yeast. It's even more surprising that they usually actually get a proper answer...

[Benta]

You're all still missing the "mechatronics" part. Just sayin'. Chinese won't bring anything there.

Mechatronics = machinery + electronics.

Wrong.

Mechatronics = mechanics + electrics/electronics.

In Europe, this is 80% automotive, but yes, it also involves industrial machinery.
But when talking about mechanics and machinery, the largest technical literature available in the world is in German and English. I'm sure there's a lot of Mandarin literature about how to copy this, but that's a different story.

The main automotive subcontractors (Bosch, Conti, Siemens etc.) sit in Germany.

[bob225]

English, Chinese, German, As a native English speaker Scottish, Welsh, and Irish translations come in handy - A few phrases of Indian help too

In a local school 26 or so languages are spoken but that is SouthEast England for you

[coppice]

Only a small percentage of people in China with a university level education understand English well enough to hold a simple conversation.

Have seen some people with that level of proficiency, but never thought that could be the majority.

In my undergrad school we had a professor from Austria who is a safety (IEC61508 kind of stuff) expert, and he delivers one lecture every year on software freedom day, and he also delivers seminars annually on designing functionally safe systems.

Being man in charge of our open source society, I prepare for the SFD event every time for two years in a row, and I attended one of his seminars.

My experience is that most students don't talk, or speak with very bad accent, but they do understand what the professor was saying.

I have worked with hundreds of university graduates in China, both in multinationals and local companies. English standards in multinationals are typically at the level you describe - most people are reluctant to speak, but people generally understand a presentation fairly well if you have good slides to give them some written cues. In local companies, if you only speak English you'd better ensure someone can translate for even the simplest activities. If you are lucky you'll meet someone with true native standard English, but not often.

[schmitt trigger]

Reading thru the posts, it is obvious that English is THE king of languages. And it will be, for the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons for that, may be that the English grammar is relatively straightforward.

Before I started studying German, I was under the impression that German was only an oddly-pronounced English. How wrong I was!! German, has several challenges which English does not have.
Starting with the noun and article genders. Myself being a native Spanish speaker, could correlate to that, but there are other aspects like cases and declinations which I had to struggle with.

Deutsche Sprache, Schwere Sprache. But as I previously stated, very worthwhile to learn.

[Macbeth]

English is obviously the most important across the whole world and most important.

Chinese really means Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or traditional, and I think knowing that could very well open up whole new markets to the west - look at Dave's 3 cent micro-controller for example. There are lots of China or Taiwanese only parts with datasheets to match.

As for German - I instantly rule that out because they all use decimal points and commas incorrectly, drive on the wrong side of the road, and even worse use U instead of V for Volt     

[coppice]

Reading thru the posts, it is obvious that English is THE king of languages. And it will be, for the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons for that, may be that the English grammar is relatively straightforward.

English grammar isn't simple. Just look at the huge range of tenses it offers. English vocabulary is also massively diverse. I think the full OED is now up to 16 thick volumes. There are three components which have made English the dominant language in the world today:

• The British Empire spread it around the world, and it stuck to a reasonable extent in most places.
• The current dominance of the US has driven it forwards
• English speakers are really flexible with their language. There is no active effort to fossilize either its vocabulary or its grammar. Many people around the world drop fragments of English into their own language all the time.

Each of those three elements has been crucial in getting English where it is.

[coppice]

Chinese really means Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or traditional, and I think knowing that could very well open up whole new markets to the west - look at Dave's 3 cent micro-controller for example. There are lots of China or Taiwanese only parts with datasheets to match.

For written Chinese traditional Chinese is still pretty important for engineering documents, because of its use in Taiwan. Documents which the Taiwanese send to China will be translated to simplified Chinese, but lots of other documents remain only in traditional Chinese.

[schmitt trigger]

I did not say simple, but straightforward. A very key difference.

My mother tongue is not English, and yet I was able to learn it very quickly simply by listening to music and movies.

Mit Deutsch? Nein.

[mvs]

As for German - I instantly rule that out because they all use decimal points and commas incorrectly, drive on the wrong side of the road, and even worse use U instead of V for Volt     

PS: Actually, we do not mix symbols used in formulas ( U - voltage, I - current, R - resistance, C - capacitance, L - inductance) with corresponding units (V - Volt, A - Amper, Ω - Ohm, F - Farad, H - Henry).

[cdev]

C, C++  .... and many others...

[tpowell1830]

Chinese really means Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or traditional, and I think knowing that could very well open up whole new markets to the west - look at Dave's 3 cent micro-controller for example. There are lots of China or Taiwanese only parts with datasheets to match.

For written Chinese traditional Chinese is still pretty important for engineering documents, because of its use in Taiwan. Documents which the Taiwanese send to China will be translated to simplified Chinese, but lots of other documents remain only in traditional Chinese.

there is always google translate:

对于书面的中国传统汉语，由于其在台湾的使用，对于工程文件仍然非常重要。台湾人寄给中国的文件将被翻译成简体中文，但许多其他文件只保留在繁体中文中。

@BlueSkull, what does this say in simplified characters?

[Mechatrommer]

You're all still missing the "mechatronics" part. Just sayin'. Chinese won't bring anything there.

Mechatronics = machinery + electronics.

Wrong.
Mechatronics = mechanics + electrics/electronics.

In Europe, this is 80% automotive...

not really interested in pointing who's right or wrong, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechatronics not really a fan of the term since it omits "programming" in it which is 1 of 3 main constituent of the field. but its not really automotive related field imho, its actually everywhere in this age. otoh, china is also manufacturing many cloned automotive/mechanical related parts, not just electronics parts.