For practical reasons I would choose Spanish. I took some Spanish classes in high school and college, but I was always better at reading it than actually speaking it, and none of it really stuck. For personal reasons I would pick Japanese. Wouldn't have to watch anime with subtitles or dubbing anymore, play some import games, etc.
I always wanted to be able to speak ....?
I already know how to speak Spanish and some French, although I wouldn't mind being more fluent. I'd like to learn R'lyehian, and maybe Italian.
Oh man there are so many languages I would love to speak! At the top of my list are: Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and French - because if you can speak all 5 of those languages, plus english, boom - more than half the world's population covered right there and then. Think about it - we're nearly 7 billion strong right? 1.3 Billion Speak Chinese, 1.1 Billion speak Hindi or Arabic (I am aware of the multitude of Indian languages, but I would guess that most Indian citizens speak Hindi, just as I'm assuming that most Chinese speak Mandarin (I'm leaving out Cantonese and many other dialects for simplicity), Many millions speak arabic and spanish..... and over a billion people have english has either a first or second language - so that's gotta total over 3.5 Billion people I could speak to if I knew those 6 languages, possibly more like 4 Billion people. How wonderful that would be!
After that, German, Japanese and Russian, due to the vast amounts of scientific papers coming out of those countries. Most of them are translated, but not well and not all of them are. It would be nice to be able to read their papers in the native language of the researchers.
Another one to really consider is Indonesian or other Malay languages. There are over 230 Million people living in Indonesia alone, and their language has a beautiful sound to it. It also uses (mostly) the Latin script, so you can pick up the writing very fast.
As for the languages lowest on my priority: Greek, Latin, Welsh, Gaelic and various indigenous languages. It's not that those languages aren't important to the speakers, or that they don't have a wonderful history that needs to be preserved, it's just that those languages aren't widely spoken, are on the decline, and the only real reason you'd learn another language is to facilitate communication between cultures, so learning a super-obscure language isn't useful to that end.
" @xMP44x said:That sounds more straightforward than I had initially imagined. I was expecting the alphabet to be this incredibly daunting thing that would be close to impossible to learn without weeks of trying to practice and recall it. I know Russian is probably the kind of language you can easily get bogged down in, but it's a language that really interests me. Thanks for explaining that dudeglove! :D" It's probably a very difficult language considering the change from Latin to Cyrillic alphabets.. "The alphabet is the main hurdle, and most of the letters are just the same as their English variants. You can learn the 33 or so letters in a day or two (handwriting is a different matter altogether). After that it's pretty simple. 99% of it is "say what you see" like German, unlike French or English for example, where you don't even pronounce the last damn letter unless there's an s on the end (or isn't, I forget), or have silent letters (e.g. ant, aunt) and homonyms (e.g. dear, deer; bare, bear etc.) "
So many... In this order: English, Spanish, Python, Java, logic, maths.
Some candidates depending on future circumstances: Japanese, German, Latin, Russian, Perl, Javascript.
Some that are cool but I'll never learn unless I can be plugged into matrix and directly download them to my brain: Chinese, Elvish, Protoss.
And then there are many things that I would like to learn and are not languages, but that's too offtopic. GL, HF.
Cantonese, there's a lot of chinese where I live, it might help....I dunno.
Spanish or Italian are my other choices
I don't have a wish list. If I really wanted to learn a language, I'd be doing it right now, not posting on the Giantbomb forums.
It'd be nice to learn other languages, but the real problem for me is the time sink involved in learning the vocab. For instance, I have French grammar down pretty well by now (at least most of it), but I stopped after last semester because I really just don't want to devote the time towards all the vocab that's necessary to be able to speak it fluently.
Russian, French and Japanese. I find Russian and French to be very sexy to listen to, and Japanese because I might get some use out of it here or there.
I am learning Japanese via Rosetta Stone. Mostly for video game purposes, and I absolutely loved Japan when I went there in 2010.
I'm American (English speaking) I like to read about Europe in WW2, so likely German. Oddly, I recognise some phrase translation in German and Italian, and much Spanish with only one year schooling in that.
Spanish/Portuguese. A lot of my friends in College spoke Portuguese and Spanish is the more popular language and it's close to Portuguese anyway so...
" @MysteriousBob said:You should probably... you know... not go on the Internet anymore...Oh and if anyone in this thread says "JAPANESE BECAUSE I LIKE ANIME AND JRPGS OMG LOL AND I WANT TO BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND ITS SUBTLE JOKES THAT ARE LOST IN LOCALISATION" I will come to your home and stab you. "You are looking at a lot of stabbing in the near future ;) "
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