Which language to learn?

French or German opens up the most options in bussiness. French is a very common second language throughout the world. French is very useful in Africa and obviously Quebec, Spanish in central and southern America.
 
Learn Italian.

Spanish is very similar, so you could pick that up at a later date :cool:
 
Learn the language that interests you the most and that you have the highest affinity for. That way you are most likely to succeed.

There are too many people who start learning a language but, because they have no other motivation than "learning a language" they fail.
 
Monserrat said:
Nah. Chinese has dialects including a lot of speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin. They would have to join forces as 1 dialect before considering world domination :-)
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Not really - Mandarin dwarfs the others in terms of number of speakers, and Cantonese is only the third most widely spoken iirc (the second being Wu). It's very common in Chinese expat communities, and of course in Hong Kong, but if you're doing business in HK then chances are the other party will speak English. It's also only a subcategory of the larger language family Yue anyway. There's a big movement towards learning Mandarin there too, given the growing number of visitors from the mainland.

Anyone who intends to move out of their village on the mainland will generally pick up at least some Mandarin first. Shanghainese for example (subdialect of Wu), I find completely unintelligible, but I've never had a problem communicating, as everyone learns Mandarin as well. Likewise for Taiwan, everyone speaks Mandarin, with a lot of people also being able to speak Taiwanese (though not everyone - I have a theory that people just speak it around me to frustrate me).

I mostly just get laughed at wherever I go far having a strong Beijing accent, which I'm trying to iron out, but half take as a compliment for sounding like I'm from Beijing rather than sounding like a foreigner speaking Chinese.

Anyway, Mandarin wasn't even an option in the OP, so I'll just leave this here I think :p
 
Some free ones here.

http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Swahili

I'm learning kiswahili. I obtained the Army colloquial German language qualification and did school boy Spanish (at the age of 45). I found Spanish slightly easier and more fun to learn. German has so many rules (time before place etc). Most Germans speak good English and if you make mistakes they will rarely correct you whereas lots of Spanish people don't speak English and that might make Spanish more rewarding for you.

Good Luck!
 
Just want to say, I've started using Duolingo and it's fantastic! Poster up top says it won't get you fluent...I'm not so sure!

If you have a microphone it gets you speaking phrases and translating phrases out loud, it also says all phrases out loud which you can translate from.

I'm learning German at the moment, I did it at GCSE nearly 10 years ago, I've forgotten most of it but I'm certain I have a better grounding of the framework than I did back then. It will be interesting to see what sort of level I can get up to. It's very easy to practice particular sections which can really help ingrain the knowledge.

If it gets me to a level where it's possible I think I would even consider getting an A-Level in the language. I'll have to see just how good it is!

Oh, and there is an app on your phone so you can practice in your lunch hour. You can disable microphone inputs if you're in a public place.
 
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