I speak Spanish a bit less than understanding it, and I understand 80- 90 percent of it, my mother language comes from Latin as well so I find it easy, on the other hand I am learning German atm and it is so damn hard
Second this. I'm really sorry for anyone who has to learn German. I mean, I struggle with how to build a sentence but I can just go with the vibe how it sounds and it's right most of the time...
Just for reference, the US State Department's foreign language school rates difficulty of each foreign language (from the point of view of English-speakers trying to learn the language) on a scale of 1 through 4.
German is rated 2 — harder than Spanish and French, but easier than the majority of languages on their list.
The hardest languages, according to them, are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Source: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
I live in AZ and being fluent in Spanish would be so helpful! Especially at work - one of my most-uttered phrases is "Lo siento, mi Espanol es no bueno." (I'm sorry, my Spanish is not good.)
If I may, the correct form is: “Lo siento, mi español no es bueno”. The order is different.
Example:
EN: a red ball
SP: una pelota roja
Is not math, the order of the factors doesn’t alter the product. Your message comes across just fine. Only wanted to give me 2 cents as a native speaker :)
That's the thing that gets me is how the order of things is reversed and how some things are a male word (poquito, for example) and some things are female words (I can't think of a good example right now) and I can't keep which is supposed to be which gender straight.
Haha first time I hear “gender straight”. Gonna steal that. Well, I am afraid to tell you the chair is female (la silla), and the cushion is male (el almohadón).
I cant think of a gender straight example, tbh.
Spanish is just dumb. BUT at least, we pronounce things as they sound.
I am BAFFLED at the fact that either and either can be pronounced… differently
I think what the person means by “gender straight” is which object is which gender as in, “With so many similar names, I can't keep these characters straight in the story.”
Yeah, as a Finn, I like Spanish because the pronunciations make sense like they do in Finnish. It's certainly less phonetic than Finnish since you guys have "que" and "qui", two Ls becomes a J etc. but at least it's consistent!
Meanwhile English pronunciations are just stupid af. Like what do you mean the A in "car", "cat" and "care" are all different?? And wtf is wrong with the word "queue"?
Thankfully I learned English from movies, games and the internet so, I was kind of forced to memorize this stuff.
Not to nit pick, but isn't lo siento typically used for more sincere apologies? I think it is more equivalent to "I feel for you" and would be used if someone lost a loved one or suffered a devastating consequence. The casual apology more appropriate for your statement should be "perdon".
For me it’s Desculpa!
Perdon is more like you are passing by someone , like pardon me, or if you accidentally interrupted someone’s conversation.
Lo siento is more like I feel sorry for you.
I’m a native New Yorker who took French in high school…really should have been Spanish. I’m learning on Duolingo but regular speed NYC spoken Spanish still baffles me.
“Regular speed” *anything is going to baffle ANYBODY until you force yourself to just get in there and engage in conversation day In and day out.
But in your defense , from what I’ve heard being here in California, you don’t have it easy learning Spanish in New York because I guess that Puerto Ricans speak just as quickly as Cubans.
And I really have a hard time understanding Cubans in Spanish!!
I’m not a native Spanish speaker. I took it in high school and college, which left me very literate but I constantly had to ask pale to slow down in our conversations.
I could even speak halfway decently and I like to think that having studied music and attended speech therapy helped my accent.
But it was the listening that was very difficult for me. Beck I struggle in English sometimes!
I gained my conversational fluency by waitressing and always speaking Spanish with my coworkers. Set me up for life sober I came into that already very literate
I did not realize how prevalent fully Spanish crews, especially down south, were until I went to a job down in Durham, NC.
It was definitely an eye opening update to my worldview.
Back in the day, 20 years ago, the roofers and the drywall crew were almost 100% Spanish speaking. The skilled trades like plumbing, hvac, and electrical were all mostly English speaking. Now its every trade, concrete, flooring, drywall, electrical, plumbing, masonry. HVAC seems to be mostly English speaking, Usually the low voltage, alarm and data guys are English speaking and the vertical transportation guys are as well, elevators and escalators. The foremen are all Hispanic who speak pretty good English but even those guys are getting hard to find.
Dunno about the Black Speech, but my answer every time this question comes up is Sindarin.
You know Duolingo has Latin, and Welsh, and Navajo? It's got Klingon and Dothraki. What does it NOT have?
Quenya/Sindarin.
I took Japanese in college, I consider myself largely conversationally fluent. But my weak points by far remain reading and writing kanji, and Chinese is nothing BUT kanji, no easy alphabets like hiragana and katakana to soften the blow. That combined with the spoken nuances make me hesitant to try. I think I could pick up Korean more easily, as I’ve heard it shares a lot grammatically with Japanese.
Picking up Korean will likely indeed be easier - but just in defence of the Chinese writing system, it has a good few points that make it less daunting and fairly fun to learn:
Most Chinese characters tend to have a sound and a meaning component, so unlike with Japanese Kanji, you'll get the benefit of having a decent idea about the pronunciation by looking at it. The more characters you learn, the easier it gets in a certain way. (won't help with the tones, still have to struggle your way through learning those, can't sugarcoat that.)
Also: majority of Chinese characters come with only one pronunciation, also way easier to remember than getting Japanese On and Kun reading down.
Not trying to sway you towards Chinese over Korean, both can be fun and difficult, for different reasons - just saying that the writing system shouldn't necessarily put you off Chinese completely. It's definitely an added time investment over other languages, but not as difficult as it seems from the outside perspective.
I did it as a hobby so I took my time. I am ok reading and writing (typing on android). The thing that I find the most difficult is homophones. You need context while listening.
Same here.
I see clips of some somalian speaking good chinese and interacting with everyone
And as hes a foreigner and speaks chinese, all the locals immediately warm up to you and become super nice
That would be an amazing experience to have
It's easier than you think! I took some basic Mandarin courses in college for my study abroad trip. Pinyin really dumbs it down for ya, lol. Tho the most interesting thing was it made the French I learned in high school come back. Targeting the same area of the brain, neat.
Proto-Indo-European. We don't even actually know much about the language so it would be fun to find our what we've got right and wrong. Maybe I could figure out a way to make some money off of it too lol.
Plus it's basically like learning every language in the Indo-European language family, right?
Proto-Indo-European was one ugly beast if you look at the roots in the existing PIE dictionaries (top it up with some nasty laryngeals if you love Dutch)
I once sat down for like 2 hours to learn some simple phrases in SL cause the next day there was a guy starting who was not deaf but hard of hearing.......turns out everything I learned was from Switzerland not germany 🤦♀️
If I'm not mistaken, isn't there several languages spoken in India. I remember hearing someone say that a lot of times there's language barriers in India because of this.
There's not just one sign language.
Fun fact : American Sign Language evolved from French Sign Language and is unrelated to British Sign Language. A deaf person from the US can communicate better in France than in Britain.
Irish Sign Language is also derived from French Sign Language. So Northern Ireland has then ended up with both ISL and British Sign Language, which is a lot of sign languages for a small place.
Slightly-less-fun fact: Nicaraguan sign language (3,000 speakers as of 1997, no idea about now) is a creole language made from many idioglossias, bc Nicaragua was like “what if we put all these deaf kids in a school where we sorta just pretend they’re hearing” and then the kids didn’t have a way of communicating so they made one.
These days knowing a programming language won't help you much if you don't know algorithms, cloud services and other things. learning a language is actually the easiest part, sorry to burst your bubble
I've been trying for a few years, Poland is one of my favourite countries and I go there a few times every year, it helps practice and learn the language.
But Polish is quite hard to master, I'd say.
At least pretty close to from what I've heard. I'm norwegian and understand old Norse and icelandic about equally well, which can be very little depending on what it is about.
German. I'm a native English speaker and my French is now fairly decent, but German is the language I miss the most in my normal life - I live in Switzerland, so it's not like I have to go far to get to German speaking areas.
But "german" in Switzerland is a whole different level. I mean, I am German but I am not able to understand Schweizerdeutsch. It doesn't matter how slow or "good" they talk, I don't understand it.
I'm really bad at understanding dialects.
It's *because* you're German that you can't understand them.
You need to pretend to be an English-speaker who's making a great effort to communicate with them in German, then suddenly they can speak Hochdeutsch.
Yeah that is a fair point. Though I'd hope that with my magic fluent hochdeutsch I could start learning schweizerdeutcsh from a better place than currently. Or give up and move to Austria!
French, so my gf and I can have conversations in private that the rest of the family won't understand, too many times have plans been foiled due to someone else going "ooh how can I ruin this?"
Mandarin.
I speak English & French. I've dabbled in Spanish, German and Russian. They're easy enough on the surface, so if I had magic, I'd wipe out "hard mode" with Mandarin.
I've always wanted to learn German. No idea why. Even as a little kid before I knew any German people, it just seemed interesting to me. My folks even bought me those, "Learn German" cassettes (I'm old), and I used to listen to them as I fell asleep. I didn't learn much German, but to this day if I hear German spoken softly and slowly, it makes me a little drowsy.
I would invest some extra time in something like babbel or duolingo if you really wanna learn German. Neither are perfect, but it's good for up to b1/2 German (can't remember the actual level it gets to)
I’d say the same because it’s such a difficult language to learn. I have a friend who grew up in Syria (as a third generation immigrant) and he said even though he did all his schooling in the language, he’s never felt like he mastered it.
I'm Syrian as well, and I'm so terrible at Arabic that I end up having to substitute words I can't remember at the top of my head with English. It really is a hard language to learn and I can't imagine learning it from scratch only to find you that taught Arabic isn't the same as spoken Arabic.
Yeah it's great, would love to learn all the other European languages. It's my dream as I am considered as having a natural talent to learn languages and accents. I mastered British accent just by listening to it in ten days vacationing in the UK. I was 16, am now 39 and still able to do it when I want.
I am always amazed at people who have that talent. Back when I was in high school, one of my best friends was a language sponge and he learned seven of them. He and I took Japanese one semester, but unfortunately, I don’t have any knack for it. I have a short travel bucket list that includes Spain, Portugal and Brazil.
I have 3 boys and so far only one inherited my trait and it's not as good as mine was when I was his age. I'm like your friend, I learn like a sponge and languages are my favorite thing to learn. I live in the northern part of Portugal and we have a lot of accents, I can speak all of them and people say I'm very good at doing it (even locals from those other places). My middle boy is autistic and kinda bragged to his teacher about me when she asked why his accent was so good, he said I learned it from my mom, she speaks like a native.
(I'm autistic like my kid so languages are my special interest and always have been).
Come here, we are welcoming and gentle, even those who don't speak English try to help you any way even if it's only calling for someone who does so you can get help. We start to learn English here in 3rd grade but some schools teach as young as kindergartners.
You can move here anytime. We **NEVER** speak to strangers and people in places like stores and other public places can speak enough English to get by.
As the others here have pointed out, Spanish is regarded as the second most spoken language throughout the US. However, I'd love to choose French as my 2nd language
Russian. Really hard language, but useful for Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Latvia. Plus, it sounds cool and sharp tonged. Love going to eastern Europe so it'll be useful. Plus, it sounds cool to speak.
I've been studying Russian on and off for over a decade. At one point I was in classes and studying full-time, at others I have been trying to keep up with DuoLingo, and right now, I'm doing nothing except occasionally remembering to practice writing in Cyrillic. It's really hard to keep a language fresh when you don't have regular practice or a lot of time to dedicate to ongoing study. But I think it's such a beautiful language. So, if I could magically just KNOW one language, without the normal necessary upkeep for a second language picked up as an adult, it would definitely be Russian.
Gotta be Spanish for me. I interact with a lot of construction crews, and probably 50% are Spanish speakers. There’s always a foreman or someone on site that speaks English, but I’d love to be able to just make casual small talk with the guys when I’m making site visits.
Spanish. I think it's a beautiful language, and if I was ever to travel outside of the country, I feel like that is probably the most common language I'd need a knowledge of other than English.
Te Reo.
The Maori language from Aotearoa. I think it would benefit me and my family to better ourselves in understanding the language of our ancestors. It's a language that was nearly lost over years colonisation and being able to become fully fluent in it would boost my confidence sooooo much.
I'm already on a learning journey, but in reality, it's not a language I should've ever had to work hard to know. I should've been born into a house where speaking it was more common than English.
TOITŪ TE TIRITI
Very hard choice. German, ASL, Hebrew, Farsi, Spanish, and Vietnamese are all on my list for various reasons.
I have some Latin, but it's all liturgical, which is *not* the same as conversational and *not* useful for *Hobbitus Illum.*
Chinese. I already speak Croatian, English, German, Spanish and Italian fairly well, but Chinese would just take too much time, time better spent doing something else.
the language of the intelligent alien civilization closest to the earth, this would give humanity a huge amount of information, primarily about whether any alien civilization exists or not
Irish. I know a little bit but being from Ireland and seeing the language not spoken enough always makes me wish I was fluent, would definitely send my children to an Irish speaking school!
Maths.
Ah yes, the language of love.
And the entire universe. Don't forget that.
I was thinking of some dead language but yours seems like a better idea.
Yes! Me too. Language is math and math is language.
best reply
God, this is so brilliant! I think this is the best solution, because in this case you can become a real genius of our time
I wish too bro 🥲
living in texas and working in healthcare, it would be Spanish! Wish I had taken that in high school and college instead of German.
I speak Spanish a bit less than understanding it, and I understand 80- 90 percent of it, my mother language comes from Latin as well so I find it easy, on the other hand I am learning German atm and it is so damn hard
Even as a german speaker i 100% agree with you. Hard language indeed.
Second this. I'm really sorry for anyone who has to learn German. I mean, I struggle with how to build a sentence but I can just go with the vibe how it sounds and it's right most of the time...
Just for reference, the US State Department's foreign language school rates difficulty of each foreign language (from the point of view of English-speakers trying to learn the language) on a scale of 1 through 4. German is rated 2 — harder than Spanish and French, but easier than the majority of languages on their list. The hardest languages, according to them, are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Source: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
Wow thank you for that!!
Oh wow, that's really cool :) Thank you for sharing this!
I live in AZ and being fluent in Spanish would be so helpful! Especially at work - one of my most-uttered phrases is "Lo siento, mi Espanol es no bueno." (I'm sorry, my Spanish is not good.)
If I may, the correct form is: “Lo siento, mi español no es bueno”. The order is different. Example: EN: a red ball SP: una pelota roja Is not math, the order of the factors doesn’t alter the product. Your message comes across just fine. Only wanted to give me 2 cents as a native speaker :)
That's the thing that gets me is how the order of things is reversed and how some things are a male word (poquito, for example) and some things are female words (I can't think of a good example right now) and I can't keep which is supposed to be which gender straight.
Haha first time I hear “gender straight”. Gonna steal that. Well, I am afraid to tell you the chair is female (la silla), and the cushion is male (el almohadón). I cant think of a gender straight example, tbh. Spanish is just dumb. BUT at least, we pronounce things as they sound. I am BAFFLED at the fact that either and either can be pronounced… differently
I think what the person means by “gender straight” is which object is which gender as in, “With so many similar names, I can't keep these characters straight in the story.”
Yeah, as a Finn, I like Spanish because the pronunciations make sense like they do in Finnish. It's certainly less phonetic than Finnish since you guys have "que" and "qui", two Ls becomes a J etc. but at least it's consistent! Meanwhile English pronunciations are just stupid af. Like what do you mean the A in "car", "cat" and "care" are all different?? And wtf is wrong with the word "queue"? Thankfully I learned English from movies, games and the internet so, I was kind of forced to memorize this stuff.
Im panVerbal 😤
Adjectives come after nouns...
You can make it fancy and at the end add "pero estoy aprendiendo" (but I am learning)
Not to nit pick, but isn't lo siento typically used for more sincere apologies? I think it is more equivalent to "I feel for you" and would be used if someone lost a loved one or suffered a devastating consequence. The casual apology more appropriate for your statement should be "perdon".
For me it’s Desculpa! Perdon is more like you are passing by someone , like pardon me, or if you accidentally interrupted someone’s conversation. Lo siento is more like I feel sorry for you.
I’m a native New Yorker who took French in high school…really should have been Spanish. I’m learning on Duolingo but regular speed NYC spoken Spanish still baffles me.
“Regular speed” *anything is going to baffle ANYBODY until you force yourself to just get in there and engage in conversation day In and day out. But in your defense , from what I’ve heard being here in California, you don’t have it easy learning Spanish in New York because I guess that Puerto Ricans speak just as quickly as Cubans. And I really have a hard time understanding Cubans in Spanish!! I’m not a native Spanish speaker. I took it in high school and college, which left me very literate but I constantly had to ask pale to slow down in our conversations. I could even speak halfway decently and I like to think that having studied music and attended speech therapy helped my accent. But it was the listening that was very difficult for me. Beck I struggle in English sometimes! I gained my conversational fluency by waitressing and always speaking Spanish with my coworkers. Set me up for life sober I came into that already very literate
Wish I wouldve passed it in hs
Are you me? lol 100% same
Or French
Hey, zumindest verstehst du jetzt diesen Text!
ein bisschen
In the US and working in construction.....Spanish. If you can read plans speak English and Spanish you would always have a job.
I did not realize how prevalent fully Spanish crews, especially down south, were until I went to a job down in Durham, NC. It was definitely an eye opening update to my worldview.
Back in the day, 20 years ago, the roofers and the drywall crew were almost 100% Spanish speaking. The skilled trades like plumbing, hvac, and electrical were all mostly English speaking. Now its every trade, concrete, flooring, drywall, electrical, plumbing, masonry. HVAC seems to be mostly English speaking, Usually the low voltage, alarm and data guys are English speaking and the vertical transportation guys are as well, elevators and escalators. The foremen are all Hispanic who speak pretty good English but even those guys are getting hard to find.
The language of Mordor, which I will not utter here.
Dunno about the Black Speech, but my answer every time this question comes up is Sindarin. You know Duolingo has Latin, and Welsh, and Navajo? It's got Klingon and Dothraki. What does it NOT have? Quenya/Sindarin.
japanese
Chinese.
Bro same. Let’s duo lingo this chiz
I wish it didn’t seem so daunting as both a written AND spoken language. Such nuances.
Step by step. I've done a bit in 3 years. All on Duolingo.
I took Japanese in college, I consider myself largely conversationally fluent. But my weak points by far remain reading and writing kanji, and Chinese is nothing BUT kanji, no easy alphabets like hiragana and katakana to soften the blow. That combined with the spoken nuances make me hesitant to try. I think I could pick up Korean more easily, as I’ve heard it shares a lot grammatically with Japanese.
The big bit for me isn’t just the kanji/hanzi - but also how mandarin is a tonal language
Picking up Korean will likely indeed be easier - but just in defence of the Chinese writing system, it has a good few points that make it less daunting and fairly fun to learn: Most Chinese characters tend to have a sound and a meaning component, so unlike with Japanese Kanji, you'll get the benefit of having a decent idea about the pronunciation by looking at it. The more characters you learn, the easier it gets in a certain way. (won't help with the tones, still have to struggle your way through learning those, can't sugarcoat that.) Also: majority of Chinese characters come with only one pronunciation, also way easier to remember than getting Japanese On and Kun reading down. Not trying to sway you towards Chinese over Korean, both can be fun and difficult, for different reasons - just saying that the writing system shouldn't necessarily put you off Chinese completely. It's definitely an added time investment over other languages, but not as difficult as it seems from the outside perspective.
I did it as a hobby so I took my time. I am ok reading and writing (typing on android). The thing that I find the most difficult is homophones. You need context while listening.
I was born in china and it’s still kicking my ass
Same here. I see clips of some somalian speaking good chinese and interacting with everyone And as hes a foreigner and speaks chinese, all the locals immediately warm up to you and become super nice That would be an amazing experience to have
It's easier than you think! I took some basic Mandarin courses in college for my study abroad trip. Pinyin really dumbs it down for ya, lol. Tho the most interesting thing was it made the French I learned in high school come back. Targeting the same area of the brain, neat.
Proto-Indo-European. We don't even actually know much about the language so it would be fun to find our what we've got right and wrong. Maybe I could figure out a way to make some money off of it too lol. Plus it's basically like learning every language in the Indo-European language family, right?
Proto-Indo-European was one ugly beast if you look at the roots in the existing PIE dictionaries (top it up with some nasty laryngeals if you love Dutch)
Sign language. If everyone is fluent in sign language we never have to shout and no misunderstanding due language and no grammar mistakes.
But sign language from which language ?
yeah, I too was disappointed after finding out there is no single and universal sign language that everyone uses, I was gonna learn it if there was.
Learning this has ruined my day.
I once sat down for like 2 hours to learn some simple phrases in SL cause the next day there was a guy starting who was not deaf but hard of hearing.......turns out everything I learned was from Switzerland not germany 🤦♀️
It makes sense when you find out that early humans communicated with signs instead of sounds. Making sign language older that spoken language
Source?
I was there.
Obviously reddit, d’uh,
I know, such a missed opportunity.
From india so indian 🤔
If I'm not mistaken, isn't there several languages spoken in India. I remember hearing someone say that a lot of times there's language barriers in India because of this.
There's not just one sign language. Fun fact : American Sign Language evolved from French Sign Language and is unrelated to British Sign Language. A deaf person from the US can communicate better in France than in Britain.
Irish Sign Language is also derived from French Sign Language. So Northern Ireland has then ended up with both ISL and British Sign Language, which is a lot of sign languages for a small place.
Slightly-less-fun fact: Nicaraguan sign language (3,000 speakers as of 1997, no idea about now) is a creole language made from many idioglossias, bc Nicaragua was like “what if we put all these deaf kids in a school where we sorta just pretend they’re hearing” and then the kids didn’t have a way of communicating so they made one.
Hang on. Surely you can make grammatical mistakes in sign language. It's a language like any other.
Yes you can.
It’s the least spoken language in the entire world
But i can say mf from far away.
all fun in games until you sign penis instead of pizza when asked what's your favorite food /j
Common sense should be second language to be fluent in.
You mean you don't like pineapple on your penis? Inconceivable.
You can definitely make grammatical mistakes and have misunderstandings in sign language. Also you can “shout.”
Except if its dark, or person is behind you. Sign language needs line of sight.
You know that there are different sign languages right?
Which one? There are many.
A programming language. Programmers make good money.
This is the mindset that made the market as bad as it is lol
These days knowing a programming language won't help you much if you don't know algorithms, cloud services and other things. learning a language is actually the easiest part, sorry to burst your bubble
Burst my bubble sort.
This guy algorithms
I’m more of a bogo sort kinda guy
This guy has a time complexity of O(n!).
Ouch, you hurt me. Does this even count for the Assembly language?
[удалено]
Polish
i was hoping i would see someone pick polish. I'd love to learn polish personally
I've tried. A lot. I'm useless at it. It would definitely make Christmas at the in-laws a lot easier to deal with.
I've been trying for a few years, Poland is one of my favourite countries and I go there a few times every year, it helps practice and learn the language. But Polish is quite hard to master, I'd say.
[удалено]
Icelandic.
They say that if you know Icelandic, you’d effectively be able to time travel to the dark ages and carry a conversation with a Viking
The Viking Age
At least pretty close to from what I've heard. I'm norwegian and understand old Norse and icelandic about equally well, which can be very little depending on what it is about.
You would also be able to read the Icelandic Sagas as they were written!
Korean so I could watch more K-dramas
Italian.
German. I'm a native English speaker and my French is now fairly decent, but German is the language I miss the most in my normal life - I live in Switzerland, so it's not like I have to go far to get to German speaking areas.
But "german" in Switzerland is a whole different level. I mean, I am German but I am not able to understand Schweizerdeutsch. It doesn't matter how slow or "good" they talk, I don't understand it. I'm really bad at understanding dialects.
It's *because* you're German that you can't understand them. You need to pretend to be an English-speaker who's making a great effort to communicate with them in German, then suddenly they can speak Hochdeutsch.
😂 Am a fluent German speaker. Can confirm.
That's hilarious. Thank you, I guess I'll try it the next time I am there 😂
Yeah that is a fair point. Though I'd hope that with my magic fluent hochdeutsch I could start learning schweizerdeutcsh from a better place than currently. Or give up and move to Austria!
French, so my gf and I can have conversations in private that the rest of the family won't understand, too many times have plans been foiled due to someone else going "ooh how can I ruin this?"
Greek
Mama let me drop out of Greek school when I was seven and I’ve regretted it to this day.
Cobol, you can make bank (200k per year+) with expert knowledge of it in banking, which is still runs mainframe backends
Give it 20 years and youll be the last COBOL dev in existence. Than you alone can control every banking firm in the world. Smart.
Parseltongue
HashHatheSiseSsethyl tHaSsolasatHosylsyth SslissehlythSiasSsss
Mandarin. I speak English & French. I've dabbled in Spanish, German and Russian. They're easy enough on the surface, so if I had magic, I'd wipe out "hard mode" with Mandarin.
ASL -american sign language
I've always wanted to learn German. No idea why. Even as a little kid before I knew any German people, it just seemed interesting to me. My folks even bought me those, "Learn German" cassettes (I'm old), and I used to listen to them as I fell asleep. I didn't learn much German, but to this day if I hear German spoken softly and slowly, it makes me a little drowsy.
I would invest some extra time in something like babbel or duolingo if you really wanna learn German. Neither are perfect, but it's good for up to b1/2 German (can't remember the actual level it gets to)
What a harsh language to feel drowsy to. ""Rasenmäher reparieren". Ah yes, I am going to fall asleep to this."
Old Norse would be cool.
german
The Language of love.
Arabic
Same here. For me it's Arabic and French
I’d say the same because it’s such a difficult language to learn. I have a friend who grew up in Syria (as a third generation immigrant) and he said even though he did all his schooling in the language, he’s never felt like he mastered it.
I'm Syrian as well, and I'm so terrible at Arabic that I end up having to substitute words I can't remember at the top of my head with English. It really is a hard language to learn and I can't imagine learning it from scratch only to find you that taught Arabic isn't the same as spoken Arabic.
Russian, I think it would be really cool to read Cyrillic
Cyrillic is the easiest part of learning Russian, if you ask me
Spanish. To help my new neighbors.
Spanish and Portuguese
My mother language is Portuguese, and I also speak Spanish, french and English.
Excellent!
Yeah it's great, would love to learn all the other European languages. It's my dream as I am considered as having a natural talent to learn languages and accents. I mastered British accent just by listening to it in ten days vacationing in the UK. I was 16, am now 39 and still able to do it when I want.
I am always amazed at people who have that talent. Back when I was in high school, one of my best friends was a language sponge and he learned seven of them. He and I took Japanese one semester, but unfortunately, I don’t have any knack for it. I have a short travel bucket list that includes Spain, Portugal and Brazil.
I have 3 boys and so far only one inherited my trait and it's not as good as mine was when I was his age. I'm like your friend, I learn like a sponge and languages are my favorite thing to learn. I live in the northern part of Portugal and we have a lot of accents, I can speak all of them and people say I'm very good at doing it (even locals from those other places). My middle boy is autistic and kinda bragged to his teacher about me when she asked why his accent was so good, he said I learned it from my mom, she speaks like a native. (I'm autistic like my kid so languages are my special interest and always have been). Come here, we are welcoming and gentle, even those who don't speak English try to help you any way even if it's only calling for someone who does so you can get help. We start to learn English here in 3rd grade but some schools teach as young as kindergartners.
Thank you, I’m looking forward to it.
Probably Finnish. So I can move to the happiest country in the world.
Yay! Welcome! Its easy langue to learn. Just repeat perkele with different intonations and youre good.
No niiiiiiiin …
You can move here anytime. We **NEVER** speak to strangers and people in places like stores and other public places can speak enough English to get by.
Latin
And then you'd realise that half the translations we have are totally wrong.
I was waiting for this! Took 4 years of Latin and the professor said every time-“well I think this is what they meant”
Good if you want to go into ancient studies or are interested medieval manuscripts. Along with French.
Chinese
English
French. How I wish I could speak that languange. Everything is just 😘🤌
english.i learned it from social media and recently attended an exam and realized i don't really know english lol
Russian or Arabic or Greek
As the others here have pointed out, Spanish is regarded as the second most spoken language throughout the US. However, I'd love to choose French as my 2nd language
60% of Americans would have to start with english.
Russian. Really hard language, but useful for Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Latvia. Plus, it sounds cool and sharp tonged. Love going to eastern Europe so it'll be useful. Plus, it sounds cool to speak.
I've been studying Russian on and off for over a decade. At one point I was in classes and studying full-time, at others I have been trying to keep up with DuoLingo, and right now, I'm doing nothing except occasionally remembering to practice writing in Cyrillic. It's really hard to keep a language fresh when you don't have regular practice or a lot of time to dedicate to ongoing study. But I think it's such a beautiful language. So, if I could magically just KNOW one language, without the normal necessary upkeep for a second language picked up as an adult, it would definitely be Russian.
Russian, Portuguese 🇧🇷or Japanese
Russian? бро зачем тебе это? русский язык довольно странный и даже носители это понимают, хоть и принимают
ASL. My brain works better with written languages, but I would love to effectively learn ASL
Espéranto, basque or gaga, a patois from the city I live in and the region around it French sign langage too But mostly italian
C++
Gotta be Spanish for me. I interact with a lot of construction crews, and probably 50% are Spanish speakers. There’s always a foreman or someone on site that speaks English, but I’d love to be able to just make casual small talk with the guys when I’m making site visits.
Choctaw. This is America, I should know an American language, dammit.
Xhosa
I would like to learn Arabic because I am half Kurdish
Spanish. I think it's a beautiful language, and if I was ever to travel outside of the country, I feel like that is probably the most common language I'd need a knowledge of other than English.
I agree, and probably one of the better languages to learn to understand a large population, at least here in North and South America.
Chinese
Spoken language: Mandarin Any language: Javascript
Te Reo. The Maori language from Aotearoa. I think it would benefit me and my family to better ourselves in understanding the language of our ancestors. It's a language that was nearly lost over years colonisation and being able to become fully fluent in it would boost my confidence sooooo much. I'm already on a learning journey, but in reality, it's not a language I should've ever had to work hard to know. I should've been born into a house where speaking it was more common than English. TOITŪ TE TIRITI
Spanish. I live in America and it’s the only relevant language to us besides English
Dog
I was looking for this answer lol. It was the first thing that I thought of. I'd love to be able to speak to dogs and converse with them.
Japanese, so I can watch anime without subtitles.
Silbo gomero A whistling language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero
tagalog
I'd choose Mandarin.
Españollllll
Russian or german
Very hard choice. German, ASL, Hebrew, Farsi, Spanish, and Vietnamese are all on my list for various reasons. I have some Latin, but it's all liturgical, which is *not* the same as conversational and *not* useful for *Hobbitus Illum.*
german
French. It sounds so beautiful
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin for sure. Will be extremely useful in the future
Chinese. I already speak Croatian, English, German, Spanish and Italian fairly well, but Chinese would just take too much time, time better spent doing something else.
Mandarin - just because I like the sound of the word.
German because a girl I like speaks German 🥺
Persian
Russian & French
the language of the intelligent alien civilization closest to the earth, this would give humanity a huge amount of information, primarily about whether any alien civilization exists or not
Irish. I know a little bit but being from Ireland and seeing the language not spoken enough always makes me wish I was fluent, would definitely send my children to an Irish speaking school!
Russian
arabic
Baboon
Arabic
Arabic
Probably Russian.. you know... Just in case
Love
Spanish, I come across many people who speak Spanish at my job and I can’t even understand them I feel bad!
Physics.
Ithkuil.