The 10 Coolest Jobs You Can Get By Learning a Foreign Language…

Knowing a foreign language can help you in many aspects of your life, including travel, family connection, and even mental health. But did you know that you can find some of the coolest jobs just by knowing another language?

Before we talk about the 10 top language jobs you can get, let’s talk about the most useful languages to learn.

Which foreign languages helps you find the top language jobs?

a. Spanish. As third most spoken language in the world, knowing how to speak Spanish will enable you to reach over 500M+ people globally. In the United States and Europe, Spanish is recognized as the second official language other than English, and is the official language in over four continents.

b. French. Not only is France the fifth biggest economy and top three locations for foreign investments, some of the top universities like HEC exist in France. Learning French opens the doors to French companies in not only France, but other French-speaking parts of the world such as Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and North and sub-Saharan Africa.

c. German. According to The Economist, German has been shown to earn you the biggest bucks if you work for a corporation:

• Spanish — 1.5 percent bonus
• French — 2.3 percent bonus
• German — 3.8 percent bonus

While German won’t give you the wide reach that a language like Spanish provides, Germany is the home to some of the top corporations in the world, particularly the top automobile brands like BMW.

d. Mandarin. It’s no surprise that Mandarin is on this list. As the most widely spoken language in the world, Mandarin is the official language of China, one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

e. Arabic. The Arab world is recognized as one of the wealthiest regions in the world, with over $600B in GDP. Due to the abundance of market opportunities in the Middle East, Western Arabic speakers are in very high demand, but in very low supply. If you have the ability to speak Arabic, don’t be surprised if people are throwing their offer letters at your desk!

What industries are these top language jobs from?

While you can benefit from knowing a foreign language with nearly every industry, here are the main highlights:

• Media (journalism) and film
• Tourism and travel services, including airlines and hotels
• Banks and insurance
• Local, state and federal government
• International non-profit organizations
• Publishing companies
• Departments of defense and international embassies
• Health services
• Social services
• Immigration services
• Elementary, high schools, universities and colleges

The 10 Top Language Jobs You Can Get With a Foreign Language

1. Game Translator

Industry: Gaming

Did you grow up playing Nintendo? Now you can make money playing it. Companies like Nintendo are always looking for in-game translators that can translate from English to Japanese or other languages. Here’s an example job posting.

2. Brand Specialist

Industry: Technology

Recognized as one of the best companies to work for, Google is hiring Brand Specialists that can communicate in foreign markets. In short, brand specialists work with customers to serve the ongoing product improvements of Google.

3. Community Representative

Industry: Gaming

Blizzard, who produces well-known video games like WoW and Diablo, is looking for a bilingual Spanish/English speaker to engage with their Latin American player communities. The job includes helping with game development and supporting the company at events, including BlizzCon.

4. Flight Attendant

Industry: Travel and Tourism

If the idea of getting paid to travel sounds exciting to you, flight attendant maybe something to look into. Depending on which airline you work for, many of these top airlines will look for flight attendants that can speak a foreign language. For example, if an airline frequently flies from the US to Spain, they’re going to prefer someone that can speak Spanish.

5. Lead Coordinator

Industry: International Non-profit Organizations

Non-profit organizations, like Pencils of Promise,  are focused on helping developing nations around the world. In many of these nations, English is not the official language. Understanding a foreign language like Spanish will help advance your position in the organization because you have the ability to communicate with the people you’re trying to help.

6. Analyst or Associate

Industry: International Banking and Finance

Banking is done all around the world, and this involves doing business with people from different cultures and countries globally. Knowing a foreign language can give you an upper hand when it comes to negotiating or deal making.

7. Photographer

Industry: Film & Media

Photography is an art that goes beyond languages, but if you want to shoot around the world, you should certainly learn a foreign language. For travel photographers, you can decide to learn the language that you would most like to travel to.

8. Fashion Buyer

Industry: Fashion

Whether it’s Milan, Barcelona, or São Paulo, fashion is a global industry, and you’ll be working with people all around the world, who speak multiple languages. It’s safe to say that Spanish, Italian, or French are great languages to learn if you’re into fashion.

9. Recruiter

Industry: Human Resources

As businesses become more global by the day, they’re also looking for employees all around the world. Companies are always building new offices in South America, Europe, and Asia. The recruiter’s role is to be able to communicate with these employees and recruit the best person for the job.

10. Foreign Correspondents

Industry: Journalism

Love telling stories? Do you dream about traveling the world and helping people share their message?
Journalism may be your calling. If you want to find the best stories, you’re going to need to know how to communicate in a language other than English, especially if you want to speak with the locals.

… and back over to you

Are there any top language jobs that we missed? We’d love to hear from you below!

Quotation:http://www.lifehack.org/

5 Deadly Mistakes that All Language Learners Make…

Let’s face it.

Learning a new language for the first time is confusing.

We often don’t know how to get started, nor do we have the time to commit to learning! This leads us to waste our energy, money, and most importantly, time.

That stops today. We’re going to show you the 5 most deadly mistakes all language learners make — and how you can avoid them.

1. Not knowing your “why”

Understanding your “why” is where it all has to start. As Simon Sinek explains in his book,
Start with Why that the reason why you’re doing something is far more important than the how or what.

This is because whenever we take on a new task or project, there’s always going to be an obstacle or struggle that we’ll need to overcome. Those who give up early on are the ones that haven’t clarified what their “why” is.

Let’s come back to language learning. Whatever your target language is — Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, etc. — what’s your “why?”

Here are some questions we recommend you ask, as explained in our free language learning course:

What you will achieve?

Who will you be able to connect with?

Who will you become as a person?

The next time you’re facing difficulty or losing motivation, just come back to these reasons, and you’ll get right back on track.

2. No clear end goal 

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”

— Tony Robbins

It doesn’t matter if we have the fastest car in the world. If we don’t know where we’re going, we’ll just end up wasting precious energy, money, and time going nowhere.

All of us have a desire that we want to fulfill; we just have to clarify what that is, and make it the driver to our success.

There are 5 key components to setting goals. Your goal has to be:

a. Visually specific — Get as visually clear as possible about what your end-result would look like, to the point where you can close your eyes and imagine it.
b. Slightly out of reach — There is a fine balance to picking a goal that’s way out of reach, to one that is within reach. This mini-goal should be something you can visually imagine, but a goal that you would need to push yourself to accomplish.
c. Measurable — What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get improved. The easiest way to do this is to put a number on it. This could be number of words memorized, the length of conversation you can have with a native speaker, etc.
d. Goal oriented — Focus on the results, not how much time you spent getting there. For example, instead of measuring how many hours you studied every week, only measure what measurable result you achieved.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how much effort you put in, unless you don’t get the results from the effort
e. Deadline specific — As Parkinson’s Law states, the time we spend completing a task will depend on the time we allocate to the task. This means that if we give ourselves 30 days to complete a report that should only take 30 minutes, that’s exactly how long we’ll take to complete it.

Whatever goal you set, make sure you have a deadline to accomplish it.

Let me share 3 examples of goals that are bad, good, and great, so you can get an understanding of how your goal compares.

Bad goal: I want to become fluent in Spanish so I can travel to Spain by next year.

Good goal: I want to become conversation fluent in Spanish so I can travel to Spain by next summer.

Great goal: I will have a 15-minute conversation in Spanish with a native Spanish person over coffee in a cafe in Madrid on July 2016.

Do you notice the difference?

Compared to the first two goals, the great goal is written as if it’s already accomplished (I want vs I will), and includes all the components of the goal-setting formula including deadline, measurability, visually specific, and results oriented.

3. No schedule

The most successful people and top-performers in their industry focus on the process, not just the deadline. Optimal performance is less important than the daily practice of taking action, no matter how hard it is or how tired you are.

If you want to write a book, this could mean waking up each morning in order to write 500 words, no matter how bad the first draft is.

If you want to double your business sales, this could mean spending every week with your team reviewing your sales numbers, and executing a new growth experiment.

If you want to lose 10 pounds, this could mean running 30 minutes every morning.

For many of us, learning a new language is not the #1 priority in our lives. It’s our family time, careers, or other side projects we may be working on.

This is why scheduling your learning time is even more important than scheduling your work time.

Here are some practical steps we recommend to schedule your learning time:

1. Pick your language learning activity — this could be memorizing 30 of the most common words on your own or working with a private language coach at Rype.
2. Figure out your free times — when are the vacant times during the day?
   If you’re a morning person, it could be before work. It could be during lunch break, or even in the evening (the most popular time for Rypers).
3. Add in 15–30 minute buffer time — schedules never go according to plan. This is why we want to make sure we add some buffer times, so if we happened to wake up later than usual, or get held from traffic on the way back from home, we can still use the buffer time to stay on track.
4. Set reminders — because we probably have a dozen things we need to remember during our days, setting notification reminders goes along way.
   This could be done through any digital calendar software you use (i.e. Google, Outlook, etc), and you can even receive them on your phone.

4. Being an information sucker

We’ve all been there. We spend hours attending a conference or reading a book. The excitement overwhelms us and our body is filled with motivation ready to master anything!

How often do we actually master it?

Research from NTL Institute has shown that people learn:

5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from a lecture.
10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.
20% of what they learn from audio-visual.
30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration
50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.
75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.
90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.

The key to learning a language is to learn by doing! This means actually going out there and practicing your skills with other people (preferably native speakers). If you don’t have anyone in your inner circle, then work with a language coach online!

5. Doing everything yourself

Ever heard the saying, “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together?”

According to best-selling author, Seth Godin:

Five Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in the World (In Anything)

1. You run out of time (and quit)
2. You run out of money (and quit)
3. You get scared (and quit)
4. You’re not serious about it (and quit)
5. You lose interest (and quit)

It’s easy to resort to going at it alone, this is how we’ve lived most of our lives.

But if you observe the best performers and the fastest learners, they have someone who works with them, whether it’s a mentor, advisor, or coach.

In almost any aspect of our lives, we have a coach that we work with, whether it’s a fitness trainer, financial advisor, business mentor, or sports coach. This is the best kept secret amongst the best performers and the fastest learners in the world.

Language learning is no different.

If you’ve truly discovered your why, and have a clear goal that you’ve set for yourself. It’s time to get outside help, to guide you through each step of the way, keep you accountable, and accelerate your learning speed.

With so many solutions out there at the tip of your finger —  from craigslist,Rype, conversation exchanges, or even Meetups — there is no excuse.

Anyone can learn a new language, no matter how old you are, how busy you are, and even if you’ve tried before. It’s finding the right strategy that works for you, and avoiding the most deadly mistakes that language learners make.

Quotation:http://www.lifehack.org/

7 of the Easiest Foreign Languages to Learn…

Who says learning a language needs to be hard?

The better question to ask is: which is the easiest language to learn in the shortest amount of time?

According to a European Commission survey in 2012, 61 per cent of British respondents could not speak a second language. In a world that’s becoming more multi-cultural and globalized by the second, getting by with just English is simply not enough. If that alone doesn’t get your juices flowing, knowing a foreign language has shown to help you make more money by adding 5-15% increase to one’s wage, and helps expand your career opportunities.

We’ve already written extensively about the most useful languages to learn, but how do we decide which is the easiest language to learn?

Playing to your strengths

One way to hack this process is to first understand that as English speakers, we have in our hands one of the most connected languages that exists. It’s linked to many European Germanic languages by descent or influence, and over 50 percent of English words stem from Latin or French.

This probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to most, as the structure, alphabet, and makeup of the language is very similar to Spanish, Italian, French, and other languages from the latin root.

Bestselling author and polyglot, Tim Ferriss, says that you should consider a new language like a new sport.

There are certain physical prerequisites (height is an advantage in basketball), rules (a runner must touch the bases in baseball), and so on that determine if you can become proficient at all, and—if so—how long it will take.

For example, it would a wiser choice and indicate a higher likelihood of success if a professional water polo player decided to transition into playing handball: similar structures, rules, and physical requirements.

However, it wouldn’t be too wise if Kobe Bryant started to play professional ice hockey. It involves learning too many new rules, an entire new skill (skating), and the likelihood of success decreases significantly (or will take 10x longer).

Language learning is no different.

As a “professional” language learner, we need to first breakdown our strengths and our understanding of existing rules and structures. If you already speak English, picking a compatible language with similar sounds and word structure like Spanish, instead of a completely different root like Mandarin, could mean the difference between reaching conversation fluency in 3 months versus 3 years.

The Golden Sentences

If you want to determine which is the easiest language to learn, you should aim to answer the following questions first.

1. Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency?
2. Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple the time it takes to acquire fluency? (particularly vowels)
3. How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere?
4. All of which answer the question: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become fluent?

An effective tool to use to answer all of these questions is called The Golden Sentences.

It comprises eight sentences that expose much of the language, and quite a few deal breakers.

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.
I must give it to him.
I want to give it to her.

Here’s a directly translated version of these sentences in Spanish.

There’s a couple of reasons why these sentences are helpful:

1. It shows you how verbs are conjugated based on the speaker (gender and number)
2. You can see a high-level view of the fundamental sentence structures, which helps you answer questions like: is it subject-verb-object (SVO) like English and Chinese (“I eat the apple”), is it subject-object-verb (SOV) like Japanese (“I the apple eat”), or something else?
3. The first three sentences shows you if the language has a noun case that may become a pain in the butt for you. For example in German, “the” might be der, das, die, dem, den and more depending on whether “the apple” is an object, indirect object, possessed by someone else, etc.

If possible, we recommend you check with a language teacher to fully understand the translation of these sentences and how transferable your existing languages are.

As a rule of thumb: use The Golden Sentences as your guiding map, before you choose the vehicle (the method). It will help you achieve your goals in half the time.

Easiest language to learn

Now let’s dive into dissecting which of the hundreds of languages that exist, is the easiest language to learn.

We profiled each of the languages we’ll mention into the following categories:

• Speaking: This is based on the ease with which learners are able to pick up this language.
• Grammar: Used as a criterion when ranking a given language as easy, moderately easy, or difficult to acquire.
• Writing: In many languages, learning to speak first and write later makes the journey easier. Other languages are equally easy to speak and write. This item spells out the easiest languages to write alongside the most difficult. As with speaking, easy, moderately easy, and difficult were used to qualify each language.

We’ve decided to rank the order of the languages from easiest to hardest to learn.

1. Spanish

Speaking: Very Easy
Grammar: Very Easy
Writing: Easy
Overall: Very Easy

As English speakers, we can be thankful that Spanish pronunciations are one of the easiest to learn.
Overall, Spanish has a shallow orthographic depth – meaning that most words are written as pronounced. This means that reading and writing in Spanish is a straightforward task.

With only ten vowel and diphthong sounds (English has 20), and no unfamiliar phonemes except for the fun-to-pronounce letter ñ. This makes learning how to speak Spanish the easiest out of the bunch, and may give you the best return on your time and investment, as 37 per cent of employers rated Spanish as a critical language to know for employment.

2. Italian

Speaking: Easy
Grammar: Easy
Writing: Moderately Easy
Overall: Easy

Italian is the most “romantic” of the romance languages. Luckily its latin-rooted vocabulary translates into many similar Italian/English cognates, such as foresta (forest), calendario (calendar), and ambizioso (ambitious).

Like Spanish, many of the words in Italian are written as pronounced. Moreover, the Italian sentence structure is highly rhythmic, with most words ending in vowels. This adds a musicality to the spoken language which makes it fairly simple to understand, and a spunky language to use.

3. French

Speaking: Moderate
Grammar: Moderate
Writing: Moderately Easy
Overall: Moderate

Welcome to the International language of love. Despite how different French may appear at first, linguists estimate that French has influenced up to a third of the modern English language.

This may also explain why French’s Latin derivations make much of the vocabulary familiar to English speakers (edifice, royal, village). There are also more verb forms (17, compared to the English 12) and gendered nouns (le crayon, la table).

But it’s not all easy.

Pronunciation in French is especially difficult, with vowel sounds and silent letters that you may not be used to in English.

4. Portuguese

Speaking: Moderate
Grammar: Moderate
Writing: Moderate
Overall: Moderate

With the Brazilian economy ranking 6th in the world, Portuguese has become a powerful language to learn. One great element of the language is that interrogatives are fairly easy, expressed by intonation alone (“You Like This?”) If you can say it in Portuguese, you can ask it. What’s more, in Brazilian Portuguese, there’s one catchall question tag form: não é.

The main difficulty with the pronunciation is the nasal vowel sounds that require some practice.

5. German

Speaking: Difficult
Grammar: Moderate
Writing: Moderate
Overall: Moderately Difficult

For many English speakers, German is a difficult language to pick up. Its long words, four noun case endings, and rough pronunciation gives your tongue quite the work out each time you speak.

German is recognized as a very descriptive language. A good example is how they use the noun by combining the object with the action at hand.

Example: das Fernsehen – the television, combines the words fern, far, andsehen, watching, lit. far-watching.

On the other hand, German can be a fun language to learn and its use of grammar is considered to be quite logical, with many overlapping words in English. Just watch out for the exceptions to the rules!

6. Hindi

Speaking: Moderate
Grammar: Moderately Difficult
Writing: Difficult
Overall: Moderately Difficult

There are many familiar words in English which are either Hindi or of Hindi origin. For example guru, jungle, karma, yoga, bungalow, cheetah, looting, thug and avatar. Hindi also uses lots of English words. They are read and pronounced as they are in English, but are written in Hindi. For example,डॉक्टर is pronounced doctor and स्टेशन is pronounced station.

This shows that while learning the vocabulary and pronunciation of Hindi may not to be too difficult due to its similarity to English, writing in Hindi is a different ball game.

7. Mandarin

Speaking: Difficult
Grammar: Difficult
Writing: Very Difficult
Overall: Very Difficult

Last, but not least: Mandarin. We mainly put this here to show you the contrasting difference between the easiest language to learn (Spanish) and the hardest language to learn, for English speakers.

While language learners won’t struggle as much on the grammar, mastering the tones can be very difficult. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means the pitch or intonation used when a word is spoken impacts its meaning. For example, tang with a high tone means soup, but tang with a rising tone means sugar.

Learning Mandarin has its rewards though, providing cultural insights and knowledge. But according to the BBC, you’ll need to memorize over 2,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper!

What’s the Easiest Language to Learn?

Winner: Spanish

The clear winner for the easiest language to learn is Spanish. Everything from writing, grammar, and speaking will come more naturally to the English speaker: similar rules, structure, and latin roots.

It’ll be like going from playing football to ultimate Frisbee.

If you are interested in learning Spanish, you can take advantage of websites like Rype, which offers unlimited one-on-one Spanish lessons with a professional teacher online. This means you can learn anytime, anywhere, on-the-go.

We also recommend checking out this Complete Guide on How to Speak Spanish.

Over to you

What do you think is the easiest language to learn? Is there something we may have missed?

Quotation:http://www.lifehack.org/

5 Reasons Why Experiences Make You Happier Than Possessions…

Ask anyone what their ultimate goal in life is and most people will tell you they want to be happy. Happiness is something we all strive to find. We believe that we will only be happy once we achieve certain things like buying the perfect house, getting married or making a load of money. For most of us money is a limited resource and what we spend our money on is what should ultimately make us happy.

It’s a great misconception that having more money will make us happier.Many studies have found that reaching a goal of wealth does make us happy but that our happiness quickly decreases thereafter. Material possessions are rife in this day and age of advancing technology and we tend to want to spend our hard-earned cash on the latest smartphones, computers or cars.

Given a choice between spending our money on possessions or some sort of experience, most people will opt for the latest gadget believing that it will make them happier in the long-run. After all, a new phone will last a lot longer than a three week holiday to New Zealand, right? Well that’s where you may be wrong and here’s five reasons why.

1. We Adapt To Possessions Quickly

Ever bought something and felt that happiness high? You think that thing is the best thing in the world in that moment, but six months down the line will you still feel the same about it? Probably not. The problem is, as humans, we are made to adapt to things. Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist from Cornell University has done extensive research in the link between money and happiness. He has found that the enemy of happiness is adaptation and we can get bored of things very easily, especially with possessions that we have less emotional attachment to. Gilovich’s studies have therefore found that money buys happiness, but only up to a point.

2. Possessions Foster Comparisons With Others

You are much less prone to negatively compare your own experiences to someone else’s than you would with material purchases. Envy can be created through comparisons about material wealth, leading to the harbouring of negativity towards others. Experiences don’t seem to have the same effect – more people tend to be fascinated rather than envious of travel, compared to what somebody owns. This is because it’s hard to quantify the relative value of any two experiences as they are very individual, therefore, jealousy and envy aren’t as much of an issue.

3. Experiences Form Our Identity

What forms our identity is not what car we drive, what latest smartphone we have or the fashionable clothes in our wardrobes. Our identity is made up of an accumulation of everything we’ve seen, the things we’ve done, and the places we’ve been. Buying the latest iPhone is exciting but it isn’t going to fundamentally change who you are; walking the Inca Trail in Peru or doing a skydive in New Zealand will enrich your life in far more ways than you could ever know. At the end of the day, we are the sum total of our experiences.

4. We Are More Interested In People’s Experiences Than Possessions

Shared experiences connect us more to other people than shared consumption. Talk to people about the latest gadget you’ve bought and you may get some takers but you will most likely lose your audience after a while. Talk about your travelling experiences and you will find people are interested to know more, they will engage with you better, and it will encourage similar stories. At the end of the day, you can’t really bond with someone who also has an Apple Watch but finding someone who has been to the same places as you can be the start of a friendship.

5. Experiences Last Longer

It is a misconception to think that a physical object will last longer than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation but this isn’t the case. Once we’ve experienced something it stays with us for years and even a lifetime; the investment is much greater and the effects are prolonged.

Anticipation is a huge plus when it comes to experiences. Excitement starts from the very minute you start planning a vacation or outing somewhere and lasts all the way through to the experience and the memories you’ll cherish forever afterwards. Gilovich also discovered that although an experience creates this excitement and anticipation, buying or ordering a purchase actually causes impatience rather than excitement.

So, maybe think twice about what you would rather spend your money on. Happiness can’t be bought but there are definitely ways of spending our money wisely that will help us achieve more happiness in our lives.

Quotation:http://www.lifehack.org/