How to Pick a Foreign Language to Learn

I’m still continuing on my post on why learning a foreign language is beneficial.
The next question to ask is; which language do you choose?

There are so many ways to look at this question. The first step is to decide why you’re learning a foreign language. A person who is doing it to communicate with family is looking at it differently from one who is looking to increase their edge in business. Some things to consider when choosing a language are:

1. Level of Difficulty
2. How Popular is the Language
3. Access to Native Speakers

These are not definitive lists, but looking at some websites concerning languages, I noticed some came up more often than others. Please feel free to disagree and leave your thoughts.

If you’re new to learning a foreign language and want to pick something up that’s easier to learn, then you might want to consider some of these languages. (I recently realized that this site is sometimes translated into other languages, so I included English for our more global readers.)

Easiest Languages to Learn:

1. Spanish
2. Italian
3. English
4. Portuguese
5. Hindi

This next category looked at languages from a business world perspective for those who are learning a foreign language to expand their career potential.

Most Popular Languages:

1. English
2. Mandarin Chinese
3. Spanish
4. Arabic
5. Japanese

I found this site to have a really good guide to help choose what language to learn. The chart is very easy to understand and it helped me with my decision. I’m working on Italian right now. My reasons are because it’s relatively easy to learn and I love the way the language sounds when spoken. I would like to feel more like a global citizen. Do you speak more than one language? If so, when and how did you learn?

Photo Credit: nuomi

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