There are plenty of reasons to want to learn a particular language; you may be entranced with a specific aspect of a particular culture (French cooking, Japanese Manga, Italian Soccer teams, etc.), you may ultimately want to visit some place (Portuguese if you want to go to Rio for Carnival, Mandarin for Beijing, C## for a job, or even Calculus to become an Astronaut…along with a lot more math…).
There are some topics which may have been current a decade to two ago (i.e. learning Japanese to get into global business, versus Korean, Mandarin, or even Malay…). There are some of the old war horses (languages which used to be fundamental parts of a liberal arts curriculum, such as French or German). There are the old classics (Greek and Latin) which, surprisingly enough still have some real value. There are the languages which are considered ‘easier’ (i.e. Spanish, or maybe German…). There are the languages which are considered very hard, or culturally ‘strange’, such as Swahili, Arabic, Hindi, or many oriental languages (e.g. the aforementioned Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, etc.). And finally, there are some languages which relate to one’s forebears (your ‘real’ native language). This is where the study is languages such as Finnish, Welsh, Ojibwa, or eve n Turkish come into the picture…
They are all valuable, but since there is only so much time in this world a student usually has to decide upon only one…maybe with the addition of some math ‘languages’ and some experience with some computer languages.
As with many other long term tasks which we deal with in life, the more analytical an approach you take in decided what to study, the better the long term results will be…
