Many easier languages or a couple difficult ones

[Le Baron]

After all, you will eventually die and lose the ability to use all of those skills anyway, so why not enjoy them while you still can enjoy things?

It's a fair point. That's why I said it might be misguided always looking at utility in the usual way. So-called 'useless knowledge' (which isn't really useless) can add a lot of joy to life.

[leosmith]

I know you have a lot of languages at a decent level, but do you use them all and all the time?

It depends on what you mean by "all the time". I maintain one per day, I can hold an intermediate level conversation in any of them on any given day, and I travel 6-months/year in my target countries.

At some point in your life you will regret the things that you did and what you should had done instead

Take a piece of advice from a 62 yo - stop being so concerned about what other people are doing for their hobbies, unless it's hurting you in some way.

Most so called poliglots are fake

Nah, just a handful of people on youtube.

[Le Baron]

It depends on what you mean by "all the time". I maintain one per day, I can hold an intermediate level conversation in any of them on any given day, and I travel 6-months/year in my target countries.

Ah see, in this case they are getting well employed. Being able to visit the places they are used as the local language is very motivating.

[Granrey]

I know you have a lot of languages at a decent level, but do you use them all and all the time?

It depends on what you mean by "all the time". I maintain one per day, I can hold an intermediate level conversation in any of them on any given day, and I travel 6-months/year in my target countries.

At some point in your life you will regret the things that you did and what you should had done instead

Take a piece of advice from a 62 yo - stop being so concerned about what other people are doing for their hobbies, unless it's hurting you in some way.

Most so called poliglots are fake

Nah, just a handful of people on youtube.

Sorry but I did not mention or hinted others at any point.

[tarvos]

As someone who's studied around 20 languages and uses a bunch professionally and a bunch more privately for a wide range of uses (from legal Spanish in court interpretation to vegan pasta salad recipes in French to lovebird language in Finnish), my answer is: it doesn't really matter. Your status is not elevated either way. I take a very practical approach to language learning, and that is that I learn the stuff I need to know for the purposes I have in life or the reasons I'm interested in something, and that's that.

Just learn whatever you want and/or need. The combination of languages you know will soon enough appear fully molded from the way you live your life.

[bolaobo]

In my opinion it is meaningless to give absolute durations for learning any language in isolation, be it measured in hours or in months/years. If you look at languages in isolation it may however be meaningful to give relative assessments, such as Mandarin being more time consuming for an Anglophone monoglot than for instance Dutch or Danish, but even there you have to take the circumstances in consideration

I forgot to mention before that with Chinese (depending on simplified or traditional) you get a bit of a break with Japanese thanks to the great similarities between hanzi and kanji. A few people have told me at least anecdotally that going from Chinese to Japanese in their learning path has helped them massively in tackling the beast that is the Japanese written language. So, this would surely reduce the numbers of proposed hours significantly again (like French and Creole).

Yes, it helps a lot, according to data. I've cited this before, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-Language_Proficiency_Test#Estimated_study_time.

A Chinese speaker (simplified and traditional aren't as different as people think) can reach JLPT N1 in 1700-2600 hours instead of 3000-4800. You get thousands of words "for free" since over 60% of Japanese vocabulary is of Sinic origin. When I'm reading a high-level text in Japanese, I might not know what the reading is, but I know what the word means in Hanzi so unless I'm intensive reading, I can "skip" it.

For informal/spoken/colloquial Japanese, it helps a lot less though.