Speaking Mandarin might boost your LinkedIn profile but French will feed your soul

There's more to life than thinking ahead, or at least so I assured myself when I chose to study French at university.

It's now been two years since I fetched up in Paris and it's only now that I fully appreciate what I like most about the French and why I so relish living here.

I love the Haussmann architecture, Marion Cotillard, George Brassens, the hip-hop, the good food, the dodgy cars, Zinedine Zidane, parkour, Daft Punk, skiing in the Alps...you get the idea.

France is full of people famous for their arrogance, style, pride, impudence, wit and intolerance.

The French are a captivating bunch, in particular the jeunes (young people), a loud and brazen cohort, unashamedly forthcoming with their radical political views.

Despite Britain's longstanding historical and cultural rivalry with the French, I am proud to call myself an English Francophile.

Of course I know that student life isn't forever and I'll have to earn enough to buy my baguette in the not-too-distant future.

But while many uni applicants choose their course based on future career prospects, graduate employability and average starting salaries, these criteria never once crossed my mind.

All I wanted was to find a course that I would find intellectually stimulating and an environment within which I could thrive.

I'm not altogether convinced that many of my peers choose their university course the same way – if they did, I reckon the study of modern languages would be a far more popular option.

According to UCAS, French studies applicants represent just 0.1% of the total number of university hopefuls in 2011. This statistic saddens but doesn't surprise me — I've been told on more than one occasion that French is useless, redundant, spent.

"Mandarin, Arabic or Russian are more useful," declare the sages who can see into the future. "After all, economic power is shifting east."

They're probably right and within a few years the Chinese will be running the NHS, the Saudis will own every Premier League football club and the BBC will have moved to Moscow.

However, I fiercely reject the notion that learning one of these "languages of the future" rather than French, would ultimately determine an individual's career success in business or most other spheres.

The development of English as a lingua franca in virtually all international communication is now akin to the overwhelming predominance of the US dollar in international commerce.

As Lawrence H. Summers puts it in the New York Times: "English's emergence as the global language makes it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile".

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to work internationally, speak English. If you want to work exclusively with local markets, learn the local language.

If you don't give a damn about either of the above and would rather be an interesting individual with more to talk about than your profile on LinkedIn, keep calm and study French.