As a person with English as my first language, what would be the most useful foreign language that I could learn? appeared as a question on Quora. Below we are republishing an answer from Sanda Golcea.
Choosing which language to learn is a very subjective thing.
These three lists make it clear which languages you should consider.
1. The 10 most spoken languages in the world (excluding English ofc)
Mandarin
Spanish
Hindi
Arabic
Portuguese
Bengali
Russian
Japanese
Punjabi
German
2. The list of 10 most spoken languages by number of countries
French
Arabic
Spanish
Portuguese
German
Italian
Mandarin
Malay
Kiswahili
Russian
3. The six official languages of the United Nations
Arabic
Chinese
English
French
Russian
Spanish
Why these three lists?
Of course, when you learn a new language, your point is to reach to
the biggest amount of people that language can offer for you. You
probably want the language to be the most useful language when you
trave. And languages used by mega international worldwide organizations
are good ones to take into consideration.
If you only speak English and this is going to be your first foreign
language, then you want an relatively easy language to learn.
You don't want to take years and years learning how to read all over
again. You want a language that will empower you and a language that
will be easy to learn and master to fluency.
Because if you're not fluent in the language after years and years of study, it's not going to be very useful.
Therefore I'd suggest you do not start with any language that has a
different alphabet or no alphabet, such as: Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic,
Russian, Japanese, Bengali, Punjabi, Kiswahili.
That would leave you with Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and
French. (And Malay, but I've personally never met anyone that speaks
Malay. From what I've seen this language would be useful in the Asian
continent.)
In the case of learning any language, you need to consider: Do I have resources for learning this language readily available?
And by resources I mean...
Schools: language centers or tutors
Internet resources: movies, shows, music, internet sites or software, internet TV
Other resources: newspaper, magazines, libraries or médiathèques, TV stations
And last but not least: people
If you live in the US, I'd go for Spanish.
There is a huge Spanish
community in the US. You'll probably travel to Latin America as it is
one of the closest travel destinations. There are a lot of shows and
movies/series in Spanish and a lot of internet resources and software to
teach you.
In the UK, I'd say a good bet would be French.
From London you
have a 1-hour train to Lille in France, and 2-hours to Paris. French is a
very well represented language. There are a lot of language centers
around the world and a lot of movies and French artists. You have so
many options here.
I've chosen romance languages because learning one will enable you to
understand some of what's spoken in the other romance languages; there a
lot of common roots for the words and similarities in grammar.
At any rate, choose a language and stick with it.
And make sure you have a lot of motivation, you're going to need it.
No comments:
Post a Comment