A language learners’ forum

So far I seem to enjoy more uncommon languages. Maybe because I don’t like to do things I feel obligated to. I enjoy French films and I’ve heard some okay French music, but since I feel obligated to learn French as a Canadian I just don’t feel like learning French! It would be so convenient to learn since I can walk into any public library and find a pretty big range of French books. No such luck with Hebrew! I had even less resources for Icelandic, but at least Icelandic is pretty phonetic. So I could get away with just learning by reading.

I've had to use them for one reason or another in my life, or they mix well with my obscure interests.

What do your target languages have in common?

They are all difficult for me to learn.

My current target languages are all spoken in the same area of the world and they are considered as not especially easy to learn for a French speaker.

Japanese and Esperanto both...
--Have fairly easy and case systems
--Are agglutinative
--Have a much more flexible word order than my native language
--Have a huge corpus of poetry that I will probably never get into

These are all just coincidences and don't really relate to why I have interest in either language. Generally speaking, they couldn't be more different.

They're all Eurasian.

I'm not very good at any of them.

With one exception they are all European, and I'm not very good in all of them - just a few (if any).

With a little luck and some persistence I hope to be able to extend the scope so that my target list will encompass ALL the European languages, but I'll probably still won't be very good in ALL of them - that would be too much to expect of any living soul. But moderately OK in a few of them and slightly better at a dozen or so will also be fine.

Another thing they have in common is that I study them with the gracious help of Wikipedia and other sources on the internet, but in practice the most important part of my studies takes place in my comfy chair with the help of a dozen ballpoint pens in different colours, my dictionaries and a stack of white paper. I would also like to thank my paper bin for its patience and spaciousness.

About 450 km between Luxembourg and Switzerland.

My main two languages, French and German, have a good deal in common:

• Two of the largest producers of language learning materials, after English.
• Two of the most represented languages in the Western Canon of literature, after English.
• The two biggest languages of academic literature, after Latin faded and before English took over.
• The two most important languages in Western classical music after Italian.
• The standard dialect uses the letter "r" to represent a uvular fricative.
• There is no progressive aspect.
• Compound past tense can use either "to have" or "to be" as an auxiliary, and they often use the same one for corresponding verbs.
• They both have large vowel inventories
• They come from the same area

But if you expand to any language I've dabbled in, they have nothing to do with one another. If I've heard of it, I'll dabble in it. Inuktitut, Xhosa, Mandarin, Hungarian, Russian, Homeric Greek, Czech, Toki Pona, Yoruba, Irish, Babylonian... if you see a pattern, you tell me!