Which language would you advise me to learn ?

General discussion about learning languages
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PeterMollenburg
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Languages: English (N), French (B2-certified), Dutch (High A2?), Spanish (~A1), German (long-forgotten 99%), Norwegian (false starts in 2020 & 2021)
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Re: Which language would you advise me to learn ?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Fri May 05, 2017 11:25 am

Italian:
Practical (Italy is close, inexpensive and full of Italian speakers!).
Easy-ish (you're a native French speaker with decent Spanish).

It shouldn't take that long for you to reach even B2 with consistent effort. Get to a level where you can enjoy native content and thus with little effort keep improving while creating room for another language.

Then add Russian or Japanese, as either of these will be a much longer journey than Italian. My vote is for Russian at this point for no particular reason other than I prefer it.
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Systematiker
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Re: Which language would you advise me to learn ?

Postby Systematiker » Fri May 05, 2017 2:18 pm

Atinkoriko wrote:I'm disappointed that no one's mentioned Uzbek yet


Sound the alarm, Reddit is overflowing.
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JohannaNYC
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Re: Which language would you advise me to learn ?

Postby JohannaNYC » Sat May 06, 2017 5:46 pm

What would Goldilocks do? Italian is too easy and Japanese is too hard, but Russian is just right :D

In all seriousness go ahead and get started with Russian, get used to study a language with completely different grammar and see how you do. If the challenge doesn't drive you crazy, then you can learn Japanese later. Japanese takes twice as long to learn as Russian (as per FSI) so learning Russian will give you an idea of your stamina when learning a difficult language. You can learn Russian and Italian at the same time without much problem. As a native speaker of a Romance language, Italian will be a piece of cake. However, the way Croatian grammar has kicked my behind I'd recommend devoting at least 3-6 months to only Russian before starting Italian.
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