What common questions do you get about your target language?

[IronMike]

Russian: Why? Oh really? They have a hard alphabet, right?

BCS: What? Really? Why?

Esperanto: What's that? That's a language? It's not Spanish? Where do they speak that? Then, why?

Any of the others I've studied over the years: Why the hell would you study that?

[rdearman]

Why would you learn Italian?
Because I want to talk to beautiful Italian women.

This is normally followed by a frown or a smile from the inquisitor, or a slap from my wife or both.

[lavengro]

Are you a spy. Literally always, and the only question.

Yes is the only acceptable answer

Unless you are looking to completely unnerve the person with whom you are speaking, in which case a "No" response - delivered with a carefully calculated 5% degree of concern in your tone - is warranted, to be followed by arranging to be observed later in a failed attempt to take a surreptitious picture of that person with your spy phone.

[Iversen]

Hardly any questions. Sometime during the 90s (long before my current language learning spree started) while I was in public service as a computer-something-whizz I was approached by a leader of an institution who simply asked whether I could translate a Dutch board game into Danish because they might want to produce it commercially. I'm not sure whether she just wanted to have a closer look at it or whether she really believed that my translation was ready for publication, but luckily the idea was dropped. At that time my Dutch translation skills weren't exactly topnotch awesome (they still aren't, though I am less utterly hapless now).

Later on during my active service I almost never heard any comments to my hobbies, and I didn't mention my language studies unless I had a good reason. Those few times where people have inquired about this aberration of mine they mostly just wanted to know how many languages I knew or whether I knew a certain language - i.e. just the common kind of questions. Nobody expected me to spend my spare time on ordinary sensible things so they didn't flinch when I revealed some acquaintaince with a language beyond the most common ones.

Like when a PC went berserk and sent gibberish to the printer - and I then calmly explained the poor collegue that her machine apparently had learnt to write Georgian letters. Luckily it was possible to bring it back to sanity...

However when I retired I had a goodbye reception, and my collegues then gave me a greeting card formulated in as many languages as they could squeeze out of Google translate - so apparently they had noticed that I had a rather special hobby. I appreciated that very much.

[Koneho]

Indonesian from Indonesians: Why? How long? Are you dating an Indonesian? Have you been to Indonesia? How long did you live in Indonesia?

To which my answers are always: No reason, I just like it (I may no longer have a love for the Philippines but it has instilled in me a love for Austronesian). About four or five months. No. No. Never.

Indonesian from non-Indonesians: Why aren't you learning Japanese/Chinese/Korean (insert prestigious East Asian language here) instead? Is Indonesian hard - usually after some comment on the lack of shared vocabulary. Why aren't you learning to code instead?

To which my answers are: I don't want to and East Asia =/= South East Asia. No, not really I liken it to Austronesian Esperanto and my firmly B level Tagalog makes the vocab a lot easier (except for where Arabic loans are commonplace) and I've also fiddled with Dutch and Ibero-Romance so the loans are more common than at first glance. Why would I learn to code? I'm a language teacher and hobbiest.

Tagalog from Filipinos: Why? Oh, you like reading folk lore in Tagalog, your studies are like parang so Extra. Is your wife Filipina?


Again: I live here. Not really, people especially upper middleclass Ingleseros seem to forget just how deep provincial Tagalog can be, and I live smack in the middle of a native Tagalog speaking area. No, I do not have a wife; we foreigners don't tend to get married at 26 (everyone always assumes I'm an old fart).

Tagalog from non-Filipinos: 0, zilch, nada; no one seems to care and they assume everyone speaks English or Spanish here. Even in-the-language sphere (which is dominated by much more prestigious languages) people seem to forget the linguistic diversity in the PH and Indonesia is absurd. The first house I rented a room in was full of Cebuano (south eastern dialect, the aho aho ija kind, very divergent) speakers. The first apartment I got all to myself had a few native Tagalogs, but the care takers were an old inter-ethnic couple. An Ilokano man and an Ilongga woman, and a few of the neighbors were Ilokano as well. My last roommate was a southern Tagalog (and Filipino is based off of central-northern) who took me a few months of listening to understand (I liken it to moving to the north of England after having studied RP) and my neighbors at the time were a clan of Karay-a people who spoke very stilted Tagalog. My current neighbors are surigan-on speakers (as well as the Cebuano regional lingua franca, English, and Tagalog)

I may deviate from the question a bit, but the focus on prestige languages and ignoring that many nations outside of Europe, the Americas, and Australia are quite multilingual falls on deaf ears. Everyone speaks English, it's much cooler when you're a white middle class internet-polyglot who speaks languages that have social currency. Very few people have dabbled in some of the smaller Austronesian languages that I have over the past two years. I think of how my Bambara, French, and English speaking brother in-law is dismissed while Anglos who can mutter a simple gutentag are revered.

[chove]

"Oh, do you have a Polish boyfriend?"

[nooj]

Indonesian from Indonesians:

Indonesian from non-Indonesians:

Indonesian from Nooj: sooo Javanese when?

[Nogon]

When I was in Sweden for the first time, oh so many years ago, Swedes frequently asked, genuinely surprised that a German would learn Swedish:
Why? Do you have a "sommarstuga" (summer cottage) in Sweden? And on my "no" to that "Do you have a Swedish partner?"
My answer was: Why not? I wanted to learn another foreign language, and there was a Swedish class, alongside to French, Spanish, Italien, Portugese and a few more. As I always felt more drawn to the North as to the South, I chose Swedish.
A life-changing choice it later came to be, and I'm so happy I took it.

Recently several people asked me, when they saw me reading a book in a different language than Swedish, English or German "Oh? Can you read French too?" They were speechless when they heard my answer "No, that's Afrikaans."

When I told my brother that I had started learning Polish, he just said "Polish? Are you crazy??? That's even worse than Russian!" (I agree with him. I am crazy indeed. Whether Polish is worse than Russian, I don't know. Never tried to learn that.)

[Cèid Donn]

Granted, I don't get a lot of interactions in many of my TLs, but for those TLs for which I have had a number of interactions over the years:

Gaelic:

From other speakers: "A bheil e a' còrdadh riut?" (Do you enjoy it?)
From anyone else: "Why?" or "What's that?" or "...."

French:

From other speakers: "Tu es candienne?" (Are you Canadian?)
From anyone else: "Did you learn it in school?" or "Is your family French?" (my last name is recognizably French)

German:

From other speakers: "Wo hast du Deutsch gelernt?" (Where did you learn German?) or "Warst du schon in Deutschland?" (Have you ever been to Germany?)
From anyone else: "Did you learn it in school?"

Spanish:

From other speakers: "¿Fácil, verdad?" (Easy, right?) or "¿Nesecitas español para trabajar?"(Do you need Spanish for work?)
From anyone else: "Did you learn it in school?"

[iguanamon]

Languages are not a significant topic of conversation between me and my monolingual friends and family. Most of them know that I can speak a language or two because they have heard me speak languages with people. If they ask me about it, I'll expand upon it. To a person, they are admiring and many express their own desire to learn a language. I always tell them that they can do it, but it takes a lot of work. I don't get negativity or questions scoffing about usefulness at all. I think this has to do with being from a monolingual culture and the fact that I never bring up my language skills unless it comes up naturally in conversation or someone hears me speaking a second language, sees me reading in an L2 or sees an L2 book lying around or drops in when I have L2 media on. That and I don't go around announcing to my friends and family "Hey, you want to know something interesting I'm doing? I'm learning Catalan!". That's what the forum is for.