Learn a language

Language learning is an ever-growing industry in the 21st century. While children all over the world will learn a foreign language (generally English, French, German or Spanish) as a compulsory subject at school, these days many students continue with their linguistic studies, gaining an advanced level in their chosen language, or starting another from scratch. With the world constantly growing closer thanks to irrepressible advances in communications technology, people and businesses find themselves needing to communicate to a wider audience, which can only be done by extending into foreign cultures. For example, with China's current status as an awakening economic giant, thousands of people young and old are choosing to learn Chinese in order to take advantage of the country's future affluence.

Specialised Language schools can be found in almost every sizeable city throughout the globe. As the world's lingua franca, the most popular language course remains the traditional English course, helping foreign citizens learn the language that gives them access not only to developed English-speaking countries such as the UK, USA and Australia, but also to hundreds of nations in which English is a widely-spoken second language.

Hundreds of schools and colleges throughout the world provide their students with the ability to study abroad for a year, and a large percentage of students eager to improve their English come to its fatherland, the UK. London is home to hundreds of language schools, where thousands of overseas students receive English tuition every day. Many language schools also offer foreign languages to their students, meaning English students can also sign up to a course and learn a language - the intermingling of English and foreign students from different countries generally serves to bolster the amount of languages spoken that aren't the speaker's primary tongue, helping them improve faster and giving them more confidence in their new-found skills - when English students undergoing, say, French tuition find themselves around native French speakers, the immersion in a foreign tongue dramatically speeds up their rate of learning. .

With the aid of so many UK English schools, English continues to be the world's most popular language, with over a billion speakers worldwide. With an ever-increasing amount of London language courses, more overseas students than ever before are flooding into the country to improve their knowledge of English language and culture. Thanks to their new language skills, people find themselves able to find well-paid jobs in English-speaking countries, as well as opening up many other lanes of communication. Thanks to the near-universal nature of English, one can visit almost any semi-developed country and converse with many of the locals, thanks to their patronage of their own English schools. With their new-found bilingualism, many students who have become proficient in English become translators, whether freelance or for an agency.

Translation services are an extremely profitable business in the right field - translation of legal materials, for example, is considered a specialist craft due to the complex and idiomatic nature of source texts, as well as the fact that most legal translation jobs are lengthy and may require several revisions. While translating to and from European languages is a sure-fire way to get work as a translator, it is the aficionados of rarer languages or languages far removed from European counterparts that can often be the jobs that pay the best. Japanese translations can be lucrative, as with translation services for Arabic, as these languages require not only knowledge of the spoken language but an in-depth understanding of the writing systems involved.