I grew up in Belgium with two parents who worked for the EU, so I have been exposed to many European languages. I would say that I "speak" English, Dutch and French, but I can mumble a few sentences of Spanish, and I would rate myself as better than the average person who has never had a lesson in German, Italian or Swedish too. I can also do a bit of Japanese, and a microscopic amount of Hungarian.

Korean is meant to be very easy to learn, plus you'll be able to watch those North Korean news broadcasts. If you want to learn a language completely frivolously, I would suggest that or Russian just because their newsreaders will be the most entertaining. If you've never learnt a language before, definitely pick one you can expose yourself to a lot. I'd love to speak Turkish, but when will I ever encounter any Turks? There's just no point in learning it.

I've spent too much time with our Slavic cousins, so by now I can quite comfortably introduce myself, comment on the weather, and then ask where the hookers are and how much they cost whether you're in Prague, Krakow or Budapest.

Update: I'm really enjoying it so far, partly because I did a lot of preparation beforehand so I wouldn't get lost which has given me the tools to really jump into the language.

While I'm worried about overstretching myself I'm wondering if I might pick up another language outside of the romance languages for a challenge. Perhaps Mandarin or Japanese but it's a tough choice to make considering the amount of work involved and it being a lot less clear and obvious for geopolitical reasons - 10 years ago it would be Mandarin was the language to pick up but these days it feels more like the late 80s where Japanese or Korean make just as much if not more sense.

I asked AI first, which should really be the new LMGTFY, and got Japanese for the absurdist humour and pleasant outlook on life.

>>460465
Is North Korean tv really as mental as Japanese?

>but when will I ever encounter any Turks

That's every kebab shop isn't it? There's a lot of Turkish food I can recommend, I do contend that a Turkish breakfast is one of the best cooked breakfasts and lahmacun gives a nice Eastern Mediterranean take on a pizza.

Chinese Mandarin. My favourite hobby, very soothing, nowhere near as hard as people think it will be (the grammar structure is so easy to get going with).

I hope one day to go back for a holiday.

>>461880
How's the writing? I massively struggle with foreign languages where I also have to learn a new alphabet as well. I can read Cyrillic and most of the Greek alphabet, but I can't hack Japanese at all and I flatly refuse to even attempt something like Arabic.

>>461882
Yeah I won't lie, the writing is the most difficult part, but other than the shock of how different it is with no set alphabet, and just practice, it gets easier.

I'll absolutely butcher the explanation because I'm far from an expert and my knowledge is shocking for how long I've been studying, but lots of the more complicated Hànzì (汉字) is made up of different elements of other characters that are related.

There's also a very clear structure for how to write the characters (which brush strokes you'd do first) and after a while you get used to it.

That said reading, writing and speaking (although speaking is second hardest part after the writing because of the tonal element which again takes a lot of time to come to grips with and isn't helped by scare stories about how different tones for the same word have vastly different meanings, which whilst true is common in every language) is very easy once you get going.

I'd recommend it to anybody. There are some really good starter books I can recommend if anybody is interested.

I did spend some time in China too which also helped.

>>461926
>my knowledge is shocking for how long I've been studying

I think the advantage of being English is that we don't face any expectations when it comes to learning a language. Nobody here speaks a foreign language or even bothers with a few phrases when they do go abroad. I've been learning Italian for years and everyone is still really impressed even though I'm probably at the 6 month stage where I can just about plod along with A2 level books in the language.

This is part of the reason I've avoided French because they're probably the people most likely to be a cunt about it while everyone else has a mixture of shock and flattery.

>>461929
You're spot on. When I was at university in China everybody in Beijing at least would just swap to varying levels of English rather than suffer me trying to ask where the metro was.

All except the local shop lady who spoke English, but would refuse to use it with me and made me learn one new word for an item everytime I went in. At the time being a naive younglad I thought she was just difficult, but actually she was being a very helpful teacher. Shout out to you, toilet roll and essentials selling lady in the campus shop.

I'm fluent in English and German, can fudge my way through Spanish and can understand some Japanese but as travel proved, cannot speak it. I can read Greek but do not speak or understand it.

English as a first language is a curse.

Something that learning a foreign language has taught me is how utterly shit our English education is. Knowing terms like superlative is super-duper important but we never get instructed on it in school and parents won't have a clue, instead the first time you start encountering the terms is likely when you're seriously studying a foreign language.

I actually wonder if it might be another reason we struggle to pick up a second language. At least if you're working class. Maybe the school day really should be longer just accommodate more of this stuff so we can remain competitive - which already happens at the top private schools in the country. Give those kids a few extra classes and maybe feed them dinner. That'll learn them good.

>>463547
I am >>460465 again, and one thing that always strikes me about English people in general is how little they know about languages. Posh and educated people like me, who grew up in this country, sometimes have no idea what a noun is. I don't know what they teach you in English lessons in this country, but I certainly did benefit from learning it all in French first.

>>460464
English and German. They are quite similar, give or take the shiboleth of gender. They are not identical, by way of example:
Ich möchte Erbsensuppe essen.
I would like to eat pea soup.

You can see the verbs, nouns, and all that, but (unfortunately) learning a language requires a feel for how it works. Getting to the train station is not the end goal.

>>463549
>I don't know what they teach you in English lessons in this country

Mice and Men. We learn all about Mice and Men. And of course 80 bajillion lessons on Shakespeare at ages where nobody gives a shit about Shakespearian English.

That's from what I remember anyway. I'm not sure it's necessarily wrong to try to expose kids to literature but I think it's always done in a cack-handed fashion that turns them off it more than anything. Still, you're not learning the fundamentals of linguistics which might need to be its own class or maybe we just need to properly fix foreign language learning in this country so kids are exposed to these functions from elsewhere.

>>463555

Also having "discussions" about Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy.

>>463555
Back in 2009, it was one 20th century American novel (either Of Mice and Men or To Kill A Mockingbird), one 19th century British novel (I did Jane Eyre), two Shakespeares (for me The cup of tea and Romeo & Juliet. We also had the poetry anthology - some classic English poems a couple of hundred years old, some absolute wank from Carol Ann Duffy and pals, and then modern ethnic poems about being non-white.

Other than Of Mice and Men which I do genuinely like, every other element put me off their respective genres/time periods/mediums. It's instilled a genuine hatred of poetry, I physically cringe when reading or hearing a poem, doubly so if performed live. An entire art form ruined because I had to spend hours writing essays on how Carol Ann Duffy is not a talentless hack bitch and her imagery was good actually.

>>463555
And you didn't even learn it well enough to remember the proper title.

>>463557
I've seen a similar reaction after telling Spaniards that I love Don Quixote. I guess you can't underestimate the power of the school system to forever destroy a child's love of reading.

>>463558
You're not supposed to say the full title; legend has it that if you say it three times the mice will come and make you one of their 'men'.

>>463547

>I actually wonder if it might be another reason we struggle to pick up a second language. At least if you're working class.

Working class implies a low level of schooling. Maybe you left school with your GCSEs, or even without them. In any case, the amount of foreign language classes you've had by that point isn't enough to be functional beyond ordering chips on holiday or checking into a hotel. Especially if you're the kind of working class person who was struggling in school to begin with.

I took French and German in school. French is somewhat easy because of all the Latin words shared with English, and German because of the common Germanic roots. I find that both languages can be rudimentally intelligible against English, i.e. even somebody who knows neither language can make out bits from texts in French or German.