Last week I saw the following tweet on twitter, a question I see a lot in various online forums.
So, what do you do if you want to learn a foreign language but don’t know which one? If you asked me, I would say ‘learn German’, but I am, of course, biased, just as any other language teacher would be. Ask your friends and they will remember all the horrible days of language learning at school (and a few nice ones). So, asking others might not give you the answer you want. Instead have a think about the following points:
- Which country would you like to visit on day?
- In how many countries could you use the language? Would you like to visit quite a few of those?
- Do you have relatives in a foreign country who you already visit or would like to visit?
- Do you have friends in a foreign country worth visiting?
- Would you like to work abroad? Do some research about which country/ countries would welcome people with your qualifications.
- Do you support a foreign football team or other sports people?
- Do you have favourite actors, singers, authors or other famous people from a foreign country?
If that still hasn’t helped you chose which language to learn, decide with the help of highly complicated scientific experiments, like the above tweeter did last week:
Based on yesterday’s semi-final game that’ll be German, then 😉
Edit: and based on Sunday’s final, it will be German 😆
Edit 2017: if you need any further ideas, my free online course might help: Language Learning – how to decide which is the best for you
