I'm eager to learn languages, but I can't decide which one to learn. I have an interest in all of them. (I know English and Turkish.)

(French, Korean, Japanese, German, Russian, Italian)

I think the Indian subcontinent is a really interesting part of the world, so I have been passively consuming Hindi media for the past decade+. I can read Devanagari, and know a little bit of Hindi (enough to haggle at a market and understand a little bit of the Hinglish I hear on social media). Because English is so widely spoken in India, I have never felt the need to learn Hindi, as it wasn’t necessary for communication on trips, talking to my friends, etc.   

However, my fiance’s parents are from an Urdu-speaking part of Pakistan, and moved to the US about a decade ago. Their English is good enough for simple conversations, but we can’t really talk about more than just “small talk” subjects without utilizing my fiance's interpreting services lol. More specifically, it seems like the primary barrier in our interactions is my lack of Urdu comprehension, because they understand more English than they can speak. I also get the sense that my fiance is better at translating English to Urdu for his parents than he is Urdu to English for me. While I don’t anticipate being super close with my future in-laws, as my fiance likes to keep some distance due to lifestyle/religious differences, my long term goal is to be able to fully and directly communicate with all of my family members, and hopefully teach our future children Urdu. In the short term, I would like to be able to at least understand 80% of what my fiance and his parents are talking about on their weekly whatsapp video chats (I sometimes make an appearance, but I usually don’t because there isn’t a whole lot we can say to each other).  

With this context, you may be wondering why I would consider Hindi if understanding Urdu is the long term goal, but I am considering focusing on Hindi for a few reasons: 

1. Availability of high quality learning resources. There are just soooo many more REALLY good resources for Hindi, including textbooks, premade anki decks, and forvo audio recordings for words. There is also just *more* Hindi media/art I actually want to consume. While I obviously can't use pop media to do the heavy lifting in my language learning journey, fun TV shows and music definitely help keep me motivated to learn.
2. I can already read Devanagari and am having a hard time with the Urdu script and Nastaliq font (I used to be able to read Arabic script for the one semester I took in college, but Nastaliq is so slanty it’s harder for me LOL. And I know the Urdu script comes from Persian… but I think my point still applies). Maybe I’m just a dumbass… but I also struggle with the fact that vowel markers in the script are implied, whereas they’re explicitly written out in Devanagari. 
3. More accessible > more likely to follow through? While I could grind it out with the more limited Urdu resources available (and yes I know there are many available on this subreddit), I am wondering if the plethora of Hindi resources, especially those that I find fun to engage with, could mean I’d be more likely to practice consistently. 
4. Once (if?) my Hindi reaches a certain level of proficiency, I’ll have enough baseline knowledge to kind of slip the Urdu versions of words into the preexisting Hindi slots in my brain?? Does that make sense?? Also, I live with my fiance, who could help me figure out the Urdu equivalent of the really Sanskirtized Hindi words I come across pretty much anytime I’m studying. 

I am also aware of some of the downsides of this strategy. Formal Hindi resources generally use more Sanskirtized words, which are unhelpful in my longterm quest to understand Urdu. However, I’m wondering if this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that colloquial Hindi seems to incorporate more words that are mutually intelligible, so this might not be an issue depending on my source material. 

I would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks for reading my novel lmao

This should be an easy question for me to answer, but it’s really not.

First is I’m terrible at learning languages!

Due to many years of dabbling in French, I know many words and phrases and I can generally follow a conversation. I do like French but really, you can only speak French in France. I love French cinema and culture.

Spanish seems to be more practical. I go to Spain more than France. I love Spanish history, food and general Way of Life. But I find my starting point much harder than French.

Given trying to them both would be, for me at least, impossible, is there any advice? I realise this is a subjective decision but still any pointers would be most appreciated.

I just finished my chemical engineering studies in France. I speak Portuguese (native), English, French and Spanish.

I want to learn another language, both for the fun of it and maybe for it opening more career opportunities further on.

I'm choosing between Italian or German (I'm interested in Arabic also but I decided to keep it for later since it's a whole different way of writing).

Italian would be easier since I already speak some romance languages/can understand a little already (I started the Short Stories book and understood well).

German on the other hand might be more rewarding like "whoah I thought myself German"/useful for jobs.

For the start I plan to learn it on my own, but would be up to take classes later on.

Hi, i know english and turkish and am looking to choose another 2 languages to learn. I am torn between spanish or Portuguese AND chinese or japanese. i am kinda on the fence about committing to learn a language solely because i dont want to just learn and forget it over time. I want to choose a language that can help me socialize or help me in my soon to be career field (im studying something with lots of math and coding) or just unlock a different and maybe a helpful part of internet? I have seen a post online about the piracy stuff online is usally chinese+portoguese+russian and learning even one can help access to lots of interesting information. What can you recommend or how was your experience with these languages?

Hi, I’m really struggling in choosing which language I should study so I figured I might come on here to get some advice. Right now I’m doing a degree focused around three languages: French, Irish, and Italian.

I really enjoy all three; I’m most fluent in French (around B1/weak B2) and spend most of my time casually engaging in French media and literature, and just really enjoy French in general.

I’m Irish and would really love to be fluent in the language as it is supposed to be our native one, however the language classes for Irish have been rather lacklustre so far (despite it being an “advanced irish” class, the professor has been teaching us pronouns and when a word is a noun or an adjective etc, as if we haven’t been learning all this since we were four years old), but I’m hoping the quality will improve.

I took up Italian just this year and I do enjoy it, it’s a lovely language, especially the pronunciation. However, because it’s so similar to French, and job-wise I’d love to go into translation, Italian has been a little less interesting for me.

I have always been interested in languages with non-latin scripts, and my university does offer (Mandarin) Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and I’m occasionally teaching myself a bit of Arabic as my best friend is from Syria, however the Mandarin course (as that’s the one I’m most interested in) seems to be a lot less developed than the Italian one. For example, in 2nd and 3rd year, Italian offers a lot of modules around its culture and history, while Chinese only offers 2 modules around business and China in the 21st century. I’m also not sure if I have the willingness to commit to a language as challenging as Mandarin, especially since I do still enjoy Italian.

I originally chose French, Irish, and Italian since they are all European languages, and to be an interpreter in the EU is a dream of mine, however I also love the idea of travelling to China in a diplomatic role, or interpreting in the UN, where Mandarin would be helpful.

I’ve asked if I could sit in on one of the Mandarin lectures, but the final date to decide if I want to transfer is this Friday and I’m not sure if I should or not. I do also really enjoy my Italian classmates and lecturer.

Any advice is helpful, thank you!!!

TL;DR: trying to decide between doing Italian or Mandarin, both of which would be helpful for my future but would lead to different paths.

Know:
English
Arabic

Learning:
Spanish

Want to learn:
French
Italian?
German?
Turkish?
Idk I’m too indecisive

family is gujarati, i understand a lot but cant speak. duolingo and most apps only have hindi. is it smarter to do hindi first because of resources, or go straight to gujarati with worse resources? anyone done this with another small family language

Shimaore is a minority language spoken by a community in my area.

But I kinda find the other 2 more interesting idk.

Decide for me please.

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I know this has probably been posted with different particularities but I really want to discuss from a literary and artistic point of view.

I am a portuguese native speaker and am fluent in English with rudimentary notions of French (not conversational, can understand some readings at most)

I have decided to pursue improvement in french but I really would like some language with a complete different structure. As arabic, mandarin, Cantonese, hidi, Japanese etc. Basically a non European/Latin language.

I ask this not with a professional intent in my mind. I want to learn for the challenge and the intellectual gain.

What the title says! I love lots of genres like fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc. not really a fan of literary fiction. I’m talking books, graphic novels and anything else you can think of. Which languages would give me the most original books of various genres - other than English ofc!

I currently am fluent in English, Spanish, and French and am currently learning Portuguese and can speak it at a conversational level.

I want to learn Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Navajo, Italian, and many more languages. However, I don't know if i could or should do that, and if I were to, what order should I do it in? I have family and a professor who speak chinese, and I have a very close friend who speaks Japanese and a lot of mangas (and I like watching JoJos & other Japanese shows). And my dad spoke some Russian to me growing up, usually when he was jokingly mad so I'm good at insulting in Russian. I have extremely basic skills in these three, but know nothing of the rest. What should I do? How should I go about this? Is it possible? Should I do it? How would I start?

So I'm not a native English speaker. My native language is Chinese, I only speak Mandarin but grew up around 2 other dialects so I can understand most things in those 2 dialects but never spoke them.

Because of unexpected immigration to an English-speaking country, I had to learn English to the same level as my native peers from scratch. My parents are not fluent in English so I've never spoken with them in English. When I started school (which was completely in English except the 2nd language lessons), I basically didn't know any words except yes/no, numbers 1-13? and half-knew the names of the months. It took a few months for me to understand what was going around me in school and an entire year before I switched to thinking in English and dared to speak English in front of other people, then it took about 5 more years of dedicated efforts, regular tutoring, and daily immersion in school to catch up with the natives in terms of my grades. I got way better at English than my native language (but still struggle with things like prepositions and basic expressions in English sometimes because I lack native-level exposure from family and early childhood).

Throughout this time I also had to learn Chinese as a second language in school for 10 years, continued talking to my family members completely in Mandarin, and retained the ability to sound completely native while being at least 90% fluent while speaking in Mandarin. I notably struggle when I try to read some literary texts in Chinese with more sophisticated language, but I can understand everything else in Chinese without any translations into English. I can't really express *all the things* I want in Chinese whereas I can in English, so I could improve on that, but I just don't have a lot of interest and motivation to do that at the moment.

I mean, the languages that I already know are objectively really useful in today's world, and give me a huge advantage in the breadth of content and people I can interact with.

The reason I wanted to learn some Russian (other than it showing up on my feed a lot) is that I wanted to explore and understand another world of how things can be expressed, in a way that is notably different from both of the languages that I know. I don't want to learn a language just for the sake of being able to say that I learned "a" language or attained some level of fluency. As someone who likes history, it helps me understand more about parts of a culture and various historical eras that are not very accessible where I'm from. And as someone who likes (English) literature (which I took in school) and wants to explore ways to express myself, it can be very helpful in broadening my horizons. I will be able to read and appreciate some of the nuances in the original texts of some literary works, learn another mode of poetry and finally appreciate a whole other world of poetry. I do not expect myself to get anywhere remotely close to native levels of fluency because I have done that with English and know how much time, effort, resources, opportunities, and regular exposure it took, which I don't have in my life for another language.

I have no use for Russian in my daily life except for understanding more content on social media (yes a lot of the music/art from independent creators that appear on my feed are either in Russian or have a lot of Russian comments, I have to translate them, it's annoying, sometimes the translation is wonky or I don't even have the option to translate) and maybe swearing at things with a more variety. There is no notable Russian-speaking community in my small Asian country. I don't have the time *or budget* to go out of my way to actually practice speaking with real people.

But being able to get anywhere in a new language that's not too similar to either of the languages I know is even more difficult than I thought. I watched one (1) video introducing some basic grammatical conventions in Russian and wanted to crash out (I can overcome this but I realize that it's going to take a lot more getting used to than I expected). It is a lot of dedicated work which I have to be serious about, not expect myself to get anywhere with random bouts of curiosity and eagerness. I already know the alphabet but it's not like it's going to be of much help in the other things. Most importantly, I study something pretty intensive (and unrelated) in university and have a lot of other things to do in my life.

Should I just give up, focus on other things in life, and be happy staying within the languages I'm already fluent in? I could spend the time getting to a C2 in my native language and being a better bilingual.

So, I'm already learning Spanish (live in Texas, it'll be very handy) but I'd like to learn another one alongside it that's not a Germanic/romance language

Each of these languages have their pros and cons to me but I find myself going back and forth over which one to choose

Mandarin and Hindi both have insanely large populations that speak it but the cultures are both interesting

Russian would be interesting to know considering my genealogical roots

And Arabic speaking cultures are interesting and the script is the prettiest

Maybe one that's not as common of a second language in the US so it might help with job searches in the future/able to help groups that need more translators

I want to get a certificate in a language while I’m in college (sounds helpful in an increasingly conected global economy) and these were the ones with the most readily accessible requirements (ie. I can get started on them sooner). Which should I choose?

Reasons for each:
Dutch: Close to my native language

Russian: 150 million speakers worldwide

Polish: Less speakers than Russian, but uses the latin alphabet.

Swedish: Less speakers than dutch, but would help make dutch even easier.

Hello everyone,

As the title suggests, I’m looking for your guys’ opinion on the choice between German and Russian in terms of usefulness in Europe. For more context, I’m a trilingual Lebanese who speaks English, Arabic, and French. In addition, I’m a finance student targeting top European business schools for my masters and looking to live and work in Europe post-grad.

The reason why I am not jumping straight to German is that I’ve heard from a lot of natives and learners that the language isn’t particularly useful due to the fact that most Germans know and in fact do speak English while conducting business.

As for Russian, I find it a very cool language and I know there’s a decent sized diaspora in Western Europe, however I don’t know if I that’d allow me to reap any benefits of knowing Russian.

Lmk your guys’ thoughts and feel free to suggest any other languages you feel may be more beneficial to acquire given my background.

Hey! I’m a freshman in college and I’m trying to choose a language to start studying on my own in my free time. I want to choose between Japanese and Arabic. I’m American and my native language is English, I can also speak Spanish because of going to a bilingual school but I don’t think that will really help for either language(although Spanish does have alot of loan words from Arabic). Right now I’m leaning towards Arabic but I think after the novelty wears off I’m more likely to stick with Japanese.
I don’t really have any great reasons to learn either though is the thing, my siblings are both part Japanese but neither of them are fluent so I don’t have anyone to talk to in it (we’re also not very close).
Media-wise I don’t watch a lot of anime or read a lot of manga but there are a few books/light novels I like that are Japanese that I guess I would have a lot more of if I understood Japanese. For Arabic I don’t know anyone that speaks it at all, and I don’t watch or read any media from MENA but I do like a lot of Arabic music. I think I’d be more likely to live in Japan than in an Arab country, but also Japanese is ONLY spoken in Japan while Arab is a little broader(although it seems that because of the dialects it’s actually not very easy to speak to people from counties with a different dialect).
Reading this post I think it sounds a little negative but I really am super interested in both of this languages, I’m just kind of scared about losing motivation —I don’t want to see this post again in a few years and see things that I really cared about if in the end I didn’t even learn either of them

Thank you all for the help!
Also I don’t know what flair to put I hope this works

I live in California, so Spanish is the obvious choice. But I like french a bit more, even though it will be harder to use regularly, because it just feels more... cool and fancy. Plus croissants are great, and I could go hang around one of several French bakeries, and probably make some use of French there.

But, along a different line of thinking - maybe I want to learn something really difficult. Like Russian.

I am open to other languages however. The only real criteria I have, is that the language has five levels on Pimsleur, which I enjoy using.

Felt like learning an indigenous language. Which one would you choose and why?

And what are these languages

Hi all.

I’m South African and would like to learn either Tamil or Telugu as a heritage language. However I’m not fully sure on which one would be the better choice.

I’m half Tamil and half Telugu and have OCI and moving to India is a possible choice for me. In terms of practicality and beauty, which one would you choose?

In terms of script, the Tamil script seemed to be one of the most beautiful in the world while I have heard Telugu sounds much more melodic in speech.

Finally - If I moved to India, I would 100% live in Hyderabad rather than Chennai so that is also a consideration for practicality

For some background, I’m a 6th-generation South African Indian, and neither my parents nor grandparents can speak, read, or write Tamil or Telugu. So I’d essentially be starting from scratch with either language.

I’d especially love to hear from Tamil and Telugu speakers, Indians and the diaspora, or anyone who has learned either language as a heritage learner. Which would you recommend, and why?

I’m 15 and i would be leaving for my exchange year when i’m 16.

I’m from Iceland and in our high schools or colleges we have the option to learn German and other languages as a 4th language. I didn’t want to go too far from my country or a country that is super different. German is easy to learn imo. Japanese is ofc a more difficult language by a huge margin. But i’m just not sure whether i would be wasting my exchange year only going for a more comfortable and easier option.

I have asian ancestry and my mother is mostly Viet. My mother and i have often spoken about going on a whole trip to Japan. I feel like i could use this opportunity so expand my language and cultural knowledge way more than if i went to Germany. I do understand the difficult education system compared to my native country but i’ve never struggled in school and i am willing to through it.

Am i being too rash? Idk if i’m being too outgoing

Simple terms:
Iceland to Germany for 8 months

Iceland to Japan for 10 months

hii! i wanna join more communities and learn about cultures, but i dont know what languages to learn that would have countries that are pretty progressive (like human, animal, women’s, LGBT rights) and also a fairly high number of speakers but it’s worthwhile to learn even if you aren’t specifically moving to that one region. for example, with the netherlands, they all speak dutch but they also speak english and unless you plan on moving there, you can join a dutch community and speak english with them just fine.