#(my school in brazil was german so we took mandatory german classes)

[a-fucking-tornado]

Help why is learning German so addictive 😭😭

[inthewaytoamultilinguallife]

Hello! Hope you’re doing good! :)

Have question to you. How do you choose which language to learn next? Struggling with that for months and not knowing which one to learn :/

oh - i sort of didn’t choose my languages really?

English is The language™️ everyone has to learn in my country, since it’s regarded as the “international” language as well as the “language of knowledge”. In public education we get 8 or 9 years of mandatory English classes. And since there is a very clear culture of academic bilingualism regarding English, we are put into private classes anywhere between 4-7yo, taking exam after exam year after year until we reach a B1 or B2 level, although some of us keep going until you reach at least the C1 level

So English wasn’t really up to debate really

And since most jobs require English, and most people competing for the job also have it as a second language, most young people restore to having another language to add to it. My country has a program that teaches portuguese, french, italian, uruguayan sign language and german to students of public high schools for free, which is how i studied portuguese and french. This, also, was not up to debate in my family, I had to do it or do it. My town only offered french Portuguese and Italian, and I wanted to do french and italian first, but my mom insisted on Portuguese since we live around somewhere 6 or 7 hours aways from brazil, and therefore Portuguese would look better in a job application. And so i took up portuguese.

Thankfully, I loved it, as well as the program. I never got to do italian, however, since there was a conflict on the time of the classes. I don’t know why i took up French really. In my country, it is regarded as a language of culture, of wisdom and academics, and that might have influenced it. I was also barely 15 and French was the only option I had for a free language class at hand at the moment 🤷

I don’t regret learning any of these languages, since i get to use them daily: i speak to local and foreign and immigrant people whose mother tongue is either of them with fair frequency, and at my university we don’t work with translated papers or books -you use the text straight up in french or English or whatever language it comes in (English, portuguese and french being the most common ones) They are, also, some of the most spoken languages around the entire continent i live on -America- which, having in mind that spanish is my mother tongue, is very helpful

Uruguayan sign language (LSU) was the only language i took that you can argue was made out of a conscious choice, but also not that much. I’m hoh and wanted to immerse myself in my country's Deaf community, as well as have a non-oral way of communicating, and LSU was their -our- language, so there was not exactly a choice as to what language i could choose there, although I certainly took the choice to learn it.

I don’t think i could be very much of help here, except for telling you the usual, sorry :(

(The usual being:

take a language that you will use at least over twice a month. Whether it is via reading, talking or whatever. The easiest way to do this is to take a language that is predominantly spoken in your region/country/continent but you can also think about what media do you consume a lot and what language it is predominately made in originally. Do you read a lot of manga? Do you like k-pop? Do you watch a lot of french films? Why not learn the language they were originally made in and then just watch/read/listen to them in that original language?

There is also nothing bad in starting to learn a language because you think their writing system looks beautiful or its pronunciation interest you/ sounds pretty to you, as far as you commit to learning it as any other language. You can pick a language just because you like it, and then build from there!

On that same note, you can learn a language because it is very different from the language or languages you already speak, and would like the challenge, or see how different other languages and cultures can be

At the end of the day, my only recommendation centres around choosing a language that will be helpful to you -either in job applications, or talking to other local people/immigrants/ tourists, or in giving you easier asses to education, books, movies etc, or because it teaches you about other cultures and ways of seeing the world, or even just ("just") because it makes you happy and excited to learn something new!

However, unless you want to struggle and be frustrated and depressed over it, or to drop the language less than a year in, never NEVER EVER learn a language just and only just because you want to add one more language to your list. Just, don’t please

really, please, don’t, it will not make you happy)