Hello! I'm a native speaker of English, but I was exposed to Spanish at a pretty early age despite not having any Hispanic roots. Today, I consider myself conversational in Spanish, or I can at least understand it.
I'm now interested in picking up a third language. Due to conlanging, I know bits and pieces of various languages around the world, even the obscure ones.
Here are the languages I'm thinking about learning: French (would open up even more of the world for me and I'm interested in its influence upon English), Japanese (I love the way the language sounds, but I don't see a practical need for it and I mostly just want to be able to read manga and play video games that haven't been translated into English), Portuguese (seems like a logical next step from Spanish), Mandarin (people stress the number of speakers and how important it is in business), Ancient Greek or Hebrew (for a deeper dive into hermeneutics.)
Nahuatl is one of my favorite languages, but it seems useless to actively learn and I mainly studied it as a source for my conlangs. I also like Dutch, but I've heard most of the Dutch people are fluent in English.
What would you recommend?
I want to learn another language
- LinguoFranco
- greek
- Posts: 615
- Joined: 20 Jul 2016 17:49
- Location: U.S.
Re: I want to learn another language
If you ask me, being able to enjoy Japanese media that wasn't translated is pretty practical in itself.
I can't really give a recommendation because I'm still unable to decide which language I want as my fourth, but what I'm trying (and failing) to do is to pick the one I like best and learn that.
I can't really give a recommendation because I'm still unable to decide which language I want as my fourth, but what I'm trying (and failing) to do is to pick the one I like best and learn that.
Re: I want to learn another language
Why not Russian? Tons of speakers, many monolingual, lots of learning resources, lots of media (cartoons, movies, music, etc.), and the cool factor is pretty high. Foreign enough to seem different but still IE so it doesn't feel hopelessly alien.
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- mayan
- Posts: 2080
- Joined: 11 Jan 2015 23:22
- Location: USA
Re: I want to learn another language
Most of these points also apply to Mandarin.abi wrote:Why not Russian? Tons of speakers, many monolingual, lots of learning resources, lots of media (cartoons, movies, music, etc.), and the cool factor is pretty high. Foreign enough to seem different but still IE so it doesn't feel hopelessly alien.
Re: I want to learn another language
If you have a burning desire to learn one in particular, pick that one. Damn the consequences, you will learn it much faster.