I took four years of Spanish in high school and tried two semesters of French in college for a change of pace. When I was in high school I could speak, read and write Spanish. Although my skill has atrophied from disuse, I can still read it well enough to understand Newspaper articles and the like. I’m not sure if I should invest my time more in the language I already know best, Spanish or if I should broaden my horizons by learning another. I’m not sure how well you need to understand a language, but being able to read it seems like it would be the bulk of the use cases. Wouldn’t it make more sense to learn a less commonly taught language than investing more time in languages like Spanish and French that many English speakers are familiar with? I know the standard advice is to study a language related to an area that you want to study, but I feel like this can be circular in practice because my interests reflect what there is a lot written about already in English. When I mentioned, the history of science, as an interest I’ve been recommended German. I’m becoming increasingly aware of how Western oriented the curriculum is and isn’t a lot of that the result of English language historians only knowing a couple of West European languages. I feel like I would better contribute to the overall body of knowledge by learning less commonly taught languages that have a scientific tradition.
I don’t really have one overall question. I just want to know how much you rely on foreign language as historian and any advise you have for strategizing language learning .
Entirely depends on what kind of source material you're working with. I use Mandarin quite a bit, both in linguistics and when I'm looking at historical questions, because so much has been written in Mandarin but not translated, especially things like local government records. It's also significant for me to keep up with the literature in my field, including what's written and published in China, in Mandarin.
However, a lot of people might not need much foreign language experience at all. My general suggestion is, yeah, you should know enough of a language that you can address source material in that language, assuming that it exists and assuming that you're working in a part of the world that doesn't primarily use your first language.
I’m becoming increasingly aware of how Western oriented the curriculum is and isn’t a lot of that the result of English language historians only knowing a couple of West European languages.
In fairness, "history of science" generally gets taken to mean "history of science in Europe", so it's not super surprising that would seem Western-oriented. It's not that the language choices are, it's that the general approach of some people is. There is plenty to be said about history of science in China, for example.
Anyway, how much you rely on a foreign language depends entirely on the kind of work you want to do, in which part of the world, and with what sources exist. A lot was written by colonial powers and not by colonised people, for example, so a historian of 20th century Myanmar might not use Burmese as much as you might expect, since many of the source texts out there can be English or Japanese, depending on the period and the topic. If you wanted to really study Manchu, Japanese would be pretty important just for the amount of pre-recent work done by Japanese scholars in the area.
There is unfortunately not a one-size-fits-all answer.