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if you're going to be in Central or Eastern Europe.
When my church in Portland sponsored three families of Bosnian and Kosovar refugees, we found that none of them could speak English, but they could all speak German or Russian.
Also, Indonesian for Indonesia and Malaysia.
Swahili for East Africa. French for West Africa, since no one indigenous language in the west has the reach that Swahili does in the east.
It depends where you are. But don't worry about not picking the right language. Contrary to what you might think, it's the first foreign language that's the hardest. Once you know HOW to learn a language, the others come easier. It's also easest to learn one language if you already speak one of its relatives.
If you learn French or Spanish, then Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian will be easier.
If you learn German, then Dutch and the Scandinavian languages will be easier.
Despite the I/P controversy, Arabic and Hebrew come from the same roots.
Don't worry about what language to learn "for business." Those tend to go through fads. I taught Japanese in a time when everyone was touting that as the language of the future. The market was soon flooded with college graduates who had taken one year of Japanese and spoke it at tourist level badly, and anyway, Japan is now considered yesterday's news.
I began learning Japanese at a time when it was considered a weird thing to do. Yet I've made my living with it, first as a teacher, then as a translator, continuously since 1984.
Pick the language that interests YOU. You will stick with it longer and therefore learn it better. Besides, there are business opportunities all over the world. I knew someone who took Modern Greek as an undergraduate. She was hired right out of college by a major bank that was about to open a branch in Athens. I once read about a man who started studying Romanian thirty years ago just for the hell of it, and it remained just a hobby until large numbers of Romanian emigres started coming here. Soon he was flying all over the U.S. helping social service agencies with resettlement efforts.
I would say that Spanish is definitely useful in this country and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There's the advantage of having Spanish-language TV, radio, and newspapers in most large cities, so you can easily practice.
Beyond that, just follow your own inclinations. You might want to do what I did and take a "weird" language, just because you like the culture of the country. It may lead you on some very interesting paths.
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