• Question: what language is best french,german or spainish?

    Asked by aimie101 to Arttu, Ceri, James_M, Monica, Philip on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: James M Monk

      James M Monk answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Working at CERN it can be useful to know a little French, because that is what they speak in that part of Switzerland. On the other hand, there are also labs in Germany like DESY, so if you worked there you would be better off learning German. Spanish is also good because it’s spoken in much of Latin America, so you have a large number of countries you where you could fit in.

    • Photo: Arttu Rajantie

      Arttu Rajantie answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      It depends on your own preferences. I speak some German and a little bit of French, too. In physics it is actually nice to know these languages because it means you can read original papers from the early 20th century when a lot of physics was done in German and maths in French. Of course, you don’t really need to do that because the findings have been explained in text books, but I still find it interesting to see, for example, how Einstein actually thought about relativity in 1905.

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