People often ask (whether or not this is usually a preface to another big fight about whether French or Spanish is best is another question) what language they should learn.
Basically, learn the language you have to learn or the language you want to learn.
After that, think about your skills and whether they will transfer as you learn another language. I think everyone can be a successful language learner, but some people will learn faster and better than other people in my opinion.
Why is that?
You can give your opinion, but I think there are several factors.
I think people who are good at distinguishing between little units of sound are more likely to get a good accent. This is why I think having French and English is a good combination. You get a lot of different vowels. Portuguese could be another such language. I'm a lay person, but I notice how "rich" a language is in sound. This has nothing to do with expressiveness (which Spanish, for example, has in great quantity) only richness in the number of sounds. Maybe a linguist knows the word to describe it. I call it the "sound system". Maybe phonology is the word.
So, if you start with a bigger repertory of sounds, moving to other languages is easier.
If you learn a related language, it won't be as difficult. I'm sure Slavic speakers know this, Romance language speakers, etc. Maybe the only people who don't know this are North Americans and Brits. Dutch is the
closest MAJOR language to English, but it isn't taught in a lot of places.
The second option would be to go further along the path (for English speakers) to German. We are only talking about the free aspects of language learning-the cognates, the sounds we already know, the turns of phrase that seem logical to us already somehow. "Wo ein Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg." My mother says this all the time-in English. Did you piece it out if you don't speak German? Where there's a will, there's a way.
Of course, you get lots of cognates in the Latin languages. In French, they are word perfect in spelling, but alas, they don't sound the same.
In Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, you'll see many scientific and more formal words you'll recognize without a dictionary.
That makes things much easier.
Okay, so what if you are up for a bigger challenge? You could go for some other European languages. You can study Slavic languages without Cyrillic or go for the big daddy: Russian. Russian has a lot of beautiful sounds. Remember all the literature coming out of that language? Like it or not, Russian is the king of the Slavs for influence, imo.
If you want a language that sounds good, you could go for the language formerly know as Serbo-Croatian. Now it's BHS/BCS. It can be written without Cyrillic letters and it seems (remember I'm a lay person) rather phonetic. What you see is pretty much what you get after you learn how the sounds are represented.
Are these languages "harder"? Yes, they are-according to smart language people who rate these kinds of things. You have the advantage of some shared vocabulary with other languages in Europe, but then you have those new "slavic" roots and you have to learn about that secret word "cases"...That's a grammar thing. At this point you have to ask yourself the question every language person should ask? Am I smarter or at least as smart as the average speaker of the language I'm going to learn? If you say no, then choose a language closer to your native one.
You are, actually, as smart as a Russian or a Chinese person, but your mind has to be on board with the determination to learn the language. I'm not saying that you are SMARTER, just that you could probably find your intellectual match in those language populations.
Is that dumb or what? No, it's not dumb. I think people "psych" themselves "out",to use older slang, for failure by thinking that only
"smart" people speak Russian or Chinese.
HOWEVER,
You do need a good memory for sounds and vocabulary if you are going to learn the "difficult" languages. You do not have to be a genius, but you do have to remember the new grammar, sounds, and vocabulary of languages that are far, far away from your home language-languages like Mandarin, and Japanese. I don't know how to determine this, but I wonder if remembering sequences (as in music) would be one place to look for the kind of memory you need in some languages. Of course, there are examples of polyglots who claim to be terrible at music, but I would ask them, Do you like music? Can you recognize one piece from another piece? Can you sing on pitch? I'm not suggesting musical gift, but an enjoyment of sound. Heck, look at the "music" thread here. It's very, very long.
Summary: Choose a language close to your own for your first language if you are a bit afraid of learning a new language. If you want to learn lots of languages, choose one with many vowels so you can start to fine tune your ear while you are still young.
If you like challenges, love the culture and you have a good memory, go for a difficult language or a language in the middle.
I see languages like Greek, followed by Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew as languages of medium difficulty.
I've left out most of the languages in the world-interesting native American languages, interesting languages like Finnish and Hungarian-in Europe, but not in the same group known as IE, the languages of Africa (like the lovely Swahili), and many languages with interesting scripts (go to Omniglot.com to view them), and languages like Esperanto (said to be very easy to learn) and Interlingua that have been invented as means of communication.
It's up to you.
Basically, learn the language you have to learn or the language you want to learn.
After that, think about your skills and whether they will transfer as you learn another language. I think everyone can be a successful language learner, but some people will learn faster and better than other people in my opinion.
Why is that?
You can give your opinion, but I think there are several factors.
I think people who are good at distinguishing between little units of sound are more likely to get a good accent. This is why I think having French and English is a good combination. You get a lot of different vowels. Portuguese could be another such language. I'm a lay person, but I notice how "rich" a language is in sound. This has nothing to do with expressiveness (which Spanish, for example, has in great quantity) only richness in the number of sounds. Maybe a linguist knows the word to describe it. I call it the "sound system". Maybe phonology is the word.
So, if you start with a bigger repertory of sounds, moving to other languages is easier.
If you learn a related language, it won't be as difficult. I'm sure Slavic speakers know this, Romance language speakers, etc. Maybe the only people who don't know this are North Americans and Brits. Dutch is the
closest MAJOR language to English, but it isn't taught in a lot of places.
The second option would be to go further along the path (for English speakers) to German. We are only talking about the free aspects of language learning-the cognates, the sounds we already know, the turns of phrase that seem logical to us already somehow. "Wo ein Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg." My mother says this all the time-in English. Did you piece it out if you don't speak German? Where there's a will, there's a way.
Of course, you get lots of cognates in the Latin languages. In French, they are word perfect in spelling, but alas, they don't sound the same.
In Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, you'll see many scientific and more formal words you'll recognize without a dictionary.
That makes things much easier.
Okay, so what if you are up for a bigger challenge? You could go for some other European languages. You can study Slavic languages without Cyrillic or go for the big daddy: Russian. Russian has a lot of beautiful sounds. Remember all the literature coming out of that language? Like it or not, Russian is the king of the Slavs for influence, imo.
If you want a language that sounds good, you could go for the language formerly know as Serbo-Croatian. Now it's BHS/BCS. It can be written without Cyrillic letters and it seems (remember I'm a lay person) rather phonetic. What you see is pretty much what you get after you learn how the sounds are represented.
Are these languages "harder"? Yes, they are-according to smart language people who rate these kinds of things. You have the advantage of some shared vocabulary with other languages in Europe, but then you have those new "slavic" roots and you have to learn about that secret word "cases"...That's a grammar thing. At this point you have to ask yourself the question every language person should ask? Am I smarter or at least as smart as the average speaker of the language I'm going to learn? If you say no, then choose a language closer to your native one.
You are, actually, as smart as a Russian or a Chinese person, but your mind has to be on board with the determination to learn the language. I'm not saying that you are SMARTER, just that you could probably find your intellectual match in those language populations.
Is that dumb or what? No, it's not dumb. I think people "psych" themselves "out",to use older slang, for failure by thinking that only
"smart" people speak Russian or Chinese.
HOWEVER,
You do need a good memory for sounds and vocabulary if you are going to learn the "difficult" languages. You do not have to be a genius, but you do have to remember the new grammar, sounds, and vocabulary of languages that are far, far away from your home language-languages like Mandarin, and Japanese. I don't know how to determine this, but I wonder if remembering sequences (as in music) would be one place to look for the kind of memory you need in some languages. Of course, there are examples of polyglots who claim to be terrible at music, but I would ask them, Do you like music? Can you recognize one piece from another piece? Can you sing on pitch? I'm not suggesting musical gift, but an enjoyment of sound. Heck, look at the "music" thread here. It's very, very long.
Summary: Choose a language close to your own for your first language if you are a bit afraid of learning a new language. If you want to learn lots of languages, choose one with many vowels so you can start to fine tune your ear while you are still young.
If you like challenges, love the culture and you have a good memory, go for a difficult language or a language in the middle.
I see languages like Greek, followed by Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew as languages of medium difficulty.
I've left out most of the languages in the world-interesting native American languages, interesting languages like Finnish and Hungarian-in Europe, but not in the same group known as IE, the languages of Africa (like the lovely Swahili), and many languages with interesting scripts (go to Omniglot.com to view them), and languages like Esperanto (said to be very easy to learn) and Interlingua that have been invented as means of communication.
It's up to you.