Which Language Should I Learn How to Follow Your Heart to Your Next Tongue

Which Language Should I Learn How to Follow Your Heart to Your Next Tongue Which Language Should I Learn? How to Follow Your Heart to Your Next Tongue Wish you had a map and compass to guide you to the perfect language?All you have to do is follow your heart.Choosing a language to learn is a deeply personal process. Theres no one absolute best language to learn. The best language depends on the learner.Your choice  will have a unique effect on  your social life, your neurological anatomy, your professional opportunities, how you experience the world around you  and even your personality.Youve heard all the hype. You know how learning a language benefits your brain, lines your wallet and makes life more interesting.And youve probably found some strong incentives of your own already. Maybe your best friend just got back from a summer abroad and youre jealous of how cool she looks casually chatting with her new Francophone friends, doing activist work with the indigenous language she learned in Peru or fighting off the onslaught of employers desperate to put her Japanese skills to work selling to foreign markets.Maybe youre finally sa tisfied with your skills in your second or third language, and now youre ready to take another step down the road to becoming a professional polyglot.Perhaps you just woke up today and said, Im going to learn a language.Whatever it was that put you over the top, you know youre ready to learn a language, and you know you can do so just as easily as the next person. Which brings you to one of the most momentous and exciting decisions of your newly multilingual life: Which language should  you learn?To decide which language you should learn, the first step is to tune out all the conflicting advice on the best language, and take a look within. Know Thyself: Asking the Right Questions to Decide Which Language You Should LearnSince theres no one objective outright winner in the linguistic derby, how do you decide which foreign language is best for you?Browsing a list of the worlds 7,000 languages will quickly become overwhelming, but limiting yourself to the shortest cut-and-dried listi cles doling out wisdom on the web is too constricting.Why dont you just ask yourself?Language is more than a line on a resume. It mediates your personal life, livens your inner life and, in the end, can often influence your biggest life decisions like where you live, how you develop yourself professionally, who you fall in love with and what ideas you  expose yourself to.Ask yourself the  following  questions to start thinking about which language you should learn.Whats my mother language, and what other languages do I already know?This has a huge impact on your learning experience, and its one of the reasons theres no single best language for everyone.If youre a native English speaker whos learning a new language for the first time, you might want to start by thinking about which languages are most similar to English in their sound, structure and vocabulary. If you already speak English and Spanish, then a Germanic or Romance language might be the easiest pick for you.On the other hand, a very similar language might confuse your Spanish, or you might end up filling your attempts at Portuguese with clumsy literal Spanishisms.Consider your current linguistic array and how strong you feel in any other languages youve learned.  If Spanish is one of your native languagesâ€"or if youve been fluent for many yearsâ€"then picking up a similar language like Portuguese might be very easy and invite no confusion whatsoever. If youve only reached the intermediate level of Spanish or still feel shaky with it, then learning Portuguese might end up getting mixed up with your Spanish.What kind of access do I have to resources like websites, classes and native speakers?Maybe the typical choices leave you uninspired but your ethnographic interests pull you toward a more obscure language like Aymara or Saami. Theres plenty to be said for learning less commonly studied languages, but consider the availability of resources for doing so:Are there courses available online?Any Wikipe dia pages in the language?Will you have to commit to a summer or a year abroad to get access to native speakers, and if so, are you willing to do that?Whats my learning style?Individual learning style can impact how easy or difficult a language is for any given person to learn. If youve got an ear for music and a knack for impersonating accents, you might find it easier to learn tonal languages or navigate the phonological complexities of Polish.If patterns and rules arent your thing, grammatically simpler creoles and languages like Malay or Mandarin with few grammatical categories might be your path of least resistance.What parts of the world intrigue me?Its impossible to separate languages from the people who speak them and the places they live. If youre planning a career as an ambassador or an expert on  Middle Eastern politics, Arabic or Farsi might be the language for you. If West African history, Vietnamese cuisine or the beauty of the Himalayas infect you with excitement, let these geographic interests lead you to learning Hausa, Vietnamese or Tibetan.What professional fields are you interested in working in?Learning a language to get a job doesnt work. This is because you first have to ask yourself, which job do you want to get?Universities and language schools in North America love to push Mandarin and Spanish as the jobs most in-demand by employers, but thats not necessarily the case if your ideal employer is an NGO, a media company or a marketing firm.Read some publications in your field and find out if its Chinese manufacturing, Costa Rican solar panels, consulting for Kazakh firms or Angolan oil thats driving growth, and then follow the money to your ideal language.Why do you want to learn it?This one is most important of all.To figure out which language you should learn right now, start with a little introspection on your motivation for learning a language.Do you want to learn a language to meet nice people, to expand your international friend ci rcle, to challenge yourself by learning a new writing system, to access the ideas of artists and intellectuals in their own language, because you met a special guy or gal, because youre obsessed with  the food or just because you like the way a particular language sounds?There are no good or bad, right or wrong reasons for learning a language. If you follow your passion, learning will be easy, enjoyable and enriching every step of the way.These are just some big-picture questions to get you started. After enough thoughtful introspection, hopefully youll arrive at a sense of knowing what you want out of your language learning experience, and then its time to start surveying the options.Which Language Should I Learn? How to Follow Your Heart to Your Next TongueThere are almost as many languages in the world as there are reasons to learn one. Maybe your motivation isnt one of the seven well list here, but its probably similar to one of these reasonsâ€"just  a little more nuanced and at tuned to yourself and your life.Communicate with More People: Learn the Worlds Largest LanguagesTheres something to be said for raw numbers.The worlds most commonly spoken languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people, and learning one of them will allow you to expand your potential social network by six digits. Here are a few  of the worlds biggest languages by total speakers.MandarinIts  900 million  total speakers worldwide are just one of the reasons to learn Mandarin Chinese. The Chinese official language  isnt as geographically spread out as some of the other major world languages, but its still growing and not likely to be evicted from its number one spot any time soon.SpanishWith around half a billion speakers worldwide, Spanish is a giant in its own right. Whats more, itll unlock a lot more of the map for you than Mandarin with half the total number of speakers, as its an official or major  language in twenty-ish  countries around the world.ArabicBy most counts the fourth or fifth largest world language, about  300 million people speak Modern Standard Arabic and the many regional dialects  that exist around the world. Like Spanish, its got the geographic advantage over Chinese with its status as an official language in 28  countries.Expand Your Horizons: Learn a Language Known for Its Arts and CultureIf your true love is the arts, you may want to opt for a language with a strong body of art and cultural products, whether it be in the form of writing, performance, music or another language-infused form of cultural expression. Here are a few languages with well-established traditions you can get your hands, eyes and ears on.JapaneseIf youre already watching anime with the subtitles on, learning Japanese by watching anime is only a small step further.  Japanese films will give you plenty of  fodder for couch-based language learning with movies.ItalianSpeaking of movies, Italian cinema is reason enough by itself to enroll in Italian classes right away.  Sit back, sip wine and let Academy Award-winning Italian productions whisk you off to language learning land.AmharicAmharic is the main language of Ethiopia, arguably the country with the most distinctive set of cultures on the African continent, and its impossible to learn their language without learning a bit about Amharic culture. Let Ethiopian food guide you through learning your first words about cooking and eating.PortugueseThe language that brought the world bossa nova and samba is an excellent choice for language learners with an ear for music and a feel for rhythm. If learning a language through singing and dancing sounds like its up your alley, turn on some Brazilian music and start learning Portuguese with songs.Start Quickly and Easily: Learn a Language Thats Easy for English SpeakersIts hard to make a blanket statement about the easiest language to learn, because it depends on a lot of factors, one of which is your mother tongue.Neurologically speaking, your fir st language actually hard-wires your brain for languages in general.Meanwhile, other languages you speak well could cause confusion and other quirky polyglot problems. But if youre reading this blog post in your mother tongue, here are some of the easiest languages for English speakers to get started with.DutchDerived from the same Germanic vocabulary as English, Dutch is one of the closest living languages to English on the Germanic language family tree. Learn a few basic rules of pronunciation and spelling and youll already have a basic vocabulary of a few hundred words as an English speaker.FrenchThe influence of French on English goes far beyond fashionable French loanwords. For four  hundred years the French-speaking Normans  ruled England, and they left their mark on the language. Today English and French, despite their sonorant differences, share up to 45%  of the same vocabulary, largely in the form of loanwords historically borrowed from French or technical words both langu ages derived from Latin.SpanishWhile not as close to English as Dutch or French, English speakers will recognize a great deal of Latin-derived Spanish vocabulary from the start. Moreover, Spanish is a highly but regularly structured language with simple phonetics and a grammar thats nowhere near as intimidating as it looks in Spanish class. Just get down the basic differences between Spanish and English and youll be set.Get Paid: Learn a Language Thatll Land You a JobOne of the many benefits of multilingualism is the one that hits you right in the wallet: People who speak more than one language can generally expect not only a pay raise but a wider range of jobs and careers available to them.Some people earn a living off their language skills, while others use them to advance through different careers, and still other jobs are tailor-made for language majors.Whether your language skills are a career in themselves or a tool for climbing the corporate ladder, here are some of the most lucrative you can get started with.MandarinThe  near  billion speakers of the Chinese state language mean that learning Mandarin Chinese is a smart business investment. Theres hardly an industry left in the world thats not looking for people with the requisite language skills to help them break into or increase their presence in the Chinese market.CantoneseAnother Chinese language, its the one with even more tones than Mandarin and thats spoken in the wealthy financial centers like Guangdong and Hong Kong. Whats more, its the Chinese dialect spoken in most Chinatowns around the world, making it another important language for global commerce.KoreanSouth Korea is one of the Asian economies thats churning out the jobs in tech, telecommunications and manufacturing, as well as being one of the largest employers of foreign English teachers. Whether transferring within your company or striking out on your own overseas,  learning Korean is likely to give you a leg up in the application proc ess no matter what field youll be working in, and its certain to deepen your cultural experience during your stay.GermanThe European Unions economic engine speaks German, and people throughout Europe learn the language in the hopes of getting hired. Things might look uncertain elsewhere in Europe, but German is a good investment for any job-seeker interested in the continent.Stay Ahead of the Global Curve: Learn the Languages of the FutureThe best languages for business are those that are investing in the future of our always growing and changing world. Groups like the International Monetary Fund and Goldman Sachs are constantly forecasting the languages  that are growing and developing most rapidly and are most likely to be world leaders in trade and commerce in our lifetime. Here are a few of them.HindustaniAlthough its regional dialects are called Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan, most linguists think of Hindustani as one language with multiple national varieties.Nit-picky det ails aside, learning either variant of the language is enough to have conversations and make yourself understood across a large swath of the Indian subcontinent, putting you in contact with nearly half a billion people in one of the worlds fastest-growing economic regions.PortugueseWith 200 million speakers in giant Brazil alone, Portuguese is a global language in its own right. Across the world, Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) countries and regions like Angola and Macau are prospering in fields like oil and gas and financial services, making Portuguese one of the most mobile languages for following the money.ArabicIn addition to being a language of evergreen importance in international trade and politics, Arabic is also one of the fastest-growing languages on the web, making it a definite up-and-coming language for our digital future.Travel the World: Learn a Language Thats Spoken Far and WideIf youve got itchy feet and a stamp-happy passport, learning a language is one of the best ways to  open up entire new parts of the world to you. The best languages for travelers are those that are spoken across multiple countries and an extensive geographic area, as well as those thatll bring you closer in contact with local communities youd be otherwise unable to truly communicate with.SpanishStretching from the American southwest to Tierra del Fuego, brushing up on your Spanish travel phrases is the best way to explore the Western Hemisphere.SwahiliWhile many educated urbanites in East Africa speak English, the local lingua franca Swahili is an excellent way for culturally curious travelers to learn about the peoples and cultures of the African Great Lakes region.RussianWhile English will get you through most of Western Europe okay, somewhere east of Germany Russian becomes the language with the widest geographic range. From the Balkans to Siberia, youll encounter Russian speakers and other Slavic languages that your Russian will give you initial insight into.FrenchWh ile its range is limited inside Europe, French is one of the most useful travel languages outside the continent. Still the official language of many countries throughout North and Central Africa and a popularly learned language across much of the world, French travel phrases spoken to the right people can be of use as far and wide as Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Atlantic coast of the United States.Preserve Our Linguistic Heritage: Learn a Minority or Endangered LanguageWhen most of us consider learning a new language, we limit ourselves to the usual suspects, but in some ways its even more important for passionate language learners to pay a bit of attention to the worlds obscure languages.Of the worlds 7,000 languages, about half of them are expected to die out by 2050 as younger generations of speakers opt to learn bigger and more economically-promising national languages. Finding resources for studying endangered languages can be a challenge, but its not impossible. Here are a few examples of languages that are dying for new learners.DakotaOne of the largest living Native American languages, Dakota and the related Lakota language are spoken in the Upper Midwest of the US and parts of Canada. Efforts at revitalizing the language are vibrant, and you can even study it at several universities in  Minnesota.Khoi-SanThe collective name for the famous group of click languages spoken in southern Africa, the Khoi-San languages spoken by people groups like the San of Namibia are rapidly dying out under the forces of development and urbanization, and along with them vital information about not only these peoples and their cultures but a truly unique group of languages.BasqueThe language isolate spoken in Northern Spain has long puzzled linguists with its lack of known ties to any other world language, and if more learners dont pick up the language, it may not be around long enough to find the answers we seek about the worlds cultural heritage.Basque is only considered vulnerable today and is currently enjoying a Basque language renaissance, but sandwiched between big global languages like Spanish and French, its future looks shaky without an influx of motivated language learners.The Means Is the EndHopefully as you read through this list, you realized not only that theres no one language that you should learn, but also that theres no one reason for you to learn it.Languages touch on so many other areas of our lives, from jobs and friends to the food we eat and the way we see the world around us, that we should never think of them just as tools or means to an end.Learning a language is for life, and the means is the end.