What Language Would You Love To Learn?

It's completely impractical (at least for me in an everyday setting), but there's something about the Russian language that I just find to be awesome. So if I ever got to the point where I had large amounts of free time and disposable income, and wanted to pursue a foreign language, that'd be the one I'd go for.

 

Both Spanish and French fascinate me. I learned Spanish for two years, but I didn't get much out of it, since it was an online class.

 

I hate to sound like the ugly, narrow minded American, but at this point, I don't have any interest past English. Not that English doesn't keep me busy enough. (I may be a native born speaker, but there are a lot of things I don't know...)

If I ever have the chance at foreign travel, I suppose I'll try to pick up at least a little bit of the language of the destination country.

When I was in high school, I took French from the world's worst language teacher for 4 years. That was my college entrance requirement language. I also took a little German. I remember little of either language, although I suppose I could probably relearn both more easily than learning from scratch.

 

Voted Italian, Russian, and Other. Italian because it's close to Spanish, and just beautiful. Russian I like because I don't know enough about Russian culture/history and I wish to. For other I thought of Greek. I almost moved to Greece to teach English, and in preparing I found out how much I liked their own language. It's also beautiful, not to mention one of the oldest languages still in use.

 

I'd love to learn Mandarin, German and Italian. I already know a decent amount of both Spanish and Russian.

 

Well, my native tongue is German and I'm fluent in English and French; not so much in Japanese and Russian but every day conversations are okay I guess...

I'd LOVE to learn Italian and Spanish - those language really fascinate me; especially Spanish :love:

 

French, Spanish and Mandarin. I have to learn one in college to go into journalism school.

 

Too many to list (yes, including every language in your poll, to some degree or another)... A part of me says, 'why bother starting something new when you haven't even mastered the ones you went about learning a year ago?' while another says, 'don't be a fool; you never do well when something feels like a chore, and learn best when you experience something the first time'. Basically, I learn enough of a language until I feel I understand the mechanics *enough*, then move on and forget everything months later.

But when I'm in the zone, I treat language the same way math nerds treat Differential Equations, or programming geeks spend their entire weekends writing code, and make quick progress, before losing interest in maintaining those skills.

I'm familiar with French, Russian, Spanish, and to a lesser extent Arabic, Mandarin, German, and Portuguese, but that's more scratching the surface, and all I remember are very basic words, phrases, and pronunciation rules. It's been months since I've gotten serious, and I've been considering Japanese for a while now..

 

Thinking further on this...

I have no idea why, but I've often half wished I knew English English. Well enough so that people would think I'm from the UK.

Maybe this is the influence of watching too much British TV on PBS years back...

 

My dad is an Italian immigrant; I learned both English and Italian simultaneously as a child. Still am fluent in both but my "second language" can be kind of rusty and I have some trouble with verb conjugations @__@. I would like to take a refresher course someday lol.

I've been learning French in all of my years of high school but I dislike it. I wish I had chose Spanish instead. I would really like to be fluent in Spanish, Arabic (thank you for including that in the poll considering it has near 300 million native speakers but seems to be overlooked), Dutch, Japanese and Swedish.

That's too much probably. If I had to make one choice, probably Spanish. It would be somewhat easier to learn considering there's similarities with Italian language.

 

This might be of interest. A young man who speaks 11 languages. (Wow! I'm only marginally competent in 1!) Article, plus video clip:

Alex Rawlings, Oxford University Student, Speaks 11 Languages (VIDEO)

 

I've studied Spanish for almost 8 years now (freshmen in high school to senior in college), and I love it more and more each day. I'm actually reading a lot of English literature in Spanish right now; the translations don't hold up to the original texts, but that's the nature of translation. Academically, I'd give my reading and writing a B+/A-, but when I'm actually speaking to someone in Spanish, I tend to fumble a lot and stay in the present-tense.

I also grew up speaking Vietnamese to my parents, but this is the first year that I've ever taken a class to improve. It's so gratifying to learn Vietnamese. I definitely think I'm going to continue my education beyond university because I have big plans for my future—both professionally and personally.

Right now, though, I'm also learning German, Greek, and Czech. Thankfully, they're all Indo-European languages, so they have a lot of similarities in syntax, subject-verb conjugation, and two of them share the Latin alphabet.

I think it's so interesting that you say that! English is essentially the language of upward mobility in every sense of the word: social, economic, and especially academic. Think about the legacy of American/British literature and its permanent mark on the western novel.

Or, think of all the things that are translated into English and the tremendous amount of knowledge that English affords: The Bhagavad Gita (translated from Sanskrit), The Mabinogi (translated from medieval Welsh), The Táin (from Old Irish), Poetic Edda & Prose Edda (from Old Norse), and The Iliad & The Odyssey (from ancient Greek). Not to mention all the scholarly essays and research that's done by the English-speaking world.

I mean, it definitely doesn't hurt to pick up another language, but to be able to speak/read/write English is a great benefit.

 

I'm very surprised Japanese is not up there. :lol: Anywho, I really want to learn Korean, but it doesn't come nearly as natural to me like Japanese and French did. I want to relearn Japanese (and actually learn how to write it this time). I also want to get a better grasp on German and Italian, but only for musical purposes.

 

Then you'll love this:

Who’s the Best Youtube Polyglot?

:lol:

 

I'd like to learn Mandarin or arabic, but I doubt I ever will. I speak spanish and english already.

 

I would love to learn Hebrew. Something about it drives me crazy. Spanish would be very useful too, took it for a while but did not practice enough and thus forgot most of it.

 

I love Spanish, it's so easy to learn. I speak decent French, but I'd like to become fluent in it and I'd also really like to learn German.

 

Polish, more than my rusty understanding at least. It would be beneficial for work.
I'm tempted to learn one of the Nordic languages, because any one of them would be very useful. Finnish would be particularly useful, but then so would Norwegian, so ... yeah. We'll see.

 

Now that my French is good, I'm learning German and can have some very basic conversations. It's turning out to be way easier than French. From there, I could learn Scandinavian language(s) and Dutch more easily. I have a GCSE in Spanish but I've mostly forgotten how to speak it. I can still understand its grammar when written quite easily, but there are huge gaps in my vocabulary. Still something I'd like to and could revive one day.

I find learning maths and learning languages very similar. Certainly different to every other school subject anyway.

Couldn't view that video in the UK, but I think I found it elsewhere. Incredible. I'm not trying to take away from his achievement, but I reckon it would take him just as long to learn one very 'exotic' language like Chinese, Basque or Hungarian than to learn about 8 of those languages: once you know Spanish and French, it doesn't take too long to get to grips with Catalan and Italian.

I agree that languages involved with English interest me most. Knowing French and some German is really enlightening, whilst knowing about Danish pronunciation certainly sheds light on my own accent, which is in the part of England that spent longest speaking Old Norse as opposed to Old English/French/Latin. As soon as you drive out of the Danelaw the dialect changes quite abruptly (although it's a lot more blurred in the south).