which is more powerful?

[Overlord Rikonius]

Your super linguist will be a third tier punching bag.
Until his techno organic friend gets killed and somehow the remains get integrated into him.

[The Artist Formerly]

It depends on how much combat you're facing.

In a Taffy special 'Palladium combat is what happens after you've blown your skill checks' kind of game, it's to your advantage to have the extra skills.

In a Taffy special 'All Invid must die violently and painfully' kind of game, more martial arts powers are good.

[Mantisking]

One of the options under each Martial Art form is the ability to trade a Martial Arts power for a Basic Skill Package, one for one. In the process of my recently making a N&SS character, the question has arose: is it suicide to trade out all of my martial arts powers (Jujitsu, in this case, ditching all three powers) for language packages? I mean, yeah, as currently written, my character would speak English, Japanese, Italian, French, Dioula, Uyghur, Putonghua, Somali, Turkmen, Arabic, Russian, Dari, Masri, Amharic, Fulani, Swahili, and Portugues, but without any martial arts powers, am I at the complete mercy of the first Ninja I meet?

If you have enough languages that your character could be dropped anywhere in the world and still manage to communicate with whatever group of people are there? I'd say that's pretty powerful.

[bigbobsr6000]

Languages make you much more versitile. Able to infiltrate better, overhear/eavesdrop a multiple of conversations. (Especially the bad guys). The best power of this would be to keep secret from PC's and NPC's the number and languages you speak/understand.

Big Bob.............................

[Sentinel]

Which is more "powerful"? Martial Arts powers.
Which is more Useful?
Well, I could find dozens of times in a day where having more language skills would be handy, even life-saving.

That said, for the purpose of an adventure game, assuming that I already have the opportunity to select languages as Skills (scholastic, secondary, etc), I doubt I would trade in Chi Powers, Tamashiwara, Zanshin, or Arts of Invisibility.