Studying Foreign Language for fun

[StetsTerhune]

I really want to learn to speak Bahasa Malay...

I would find it incredibly hard to get the motivation to learn a language from a place where such a large percentage of people speak English. It's the same issue I have with Hindi -- in the sorts of places I would ever end up, so many people speak English.

I know this thread is about learning the languages for fun, but motivation is hard when I can't find much utility. That said I quite like Bahasa, it's a very cool sounding language, and I've picked up quite a bit of it over the years (mostly food related, lol).

[HenryDavid]

My French prof at uni said "monolingualism can be cured!"
Little kids in Morocco speak Arabic, French, Berber, some English, some German . . . . only in North America is it standard to expect one language to work all the time.
Language is a fun game in any case.
Pour moi, c'est avec le français que j'ai commencé. Poi ora l'italiano, anche ein bischen deutsch.
Catalan would also be cool though.

[lizzzi]

I am a native English speaker from the States,  but had to learn Swedish back in the day when I took a year off from school and kept house and baby-sat four kids  who could only speak Swedish... in a northern suburb of Stockholm.  I can still converse in Swedish on a rather simple level, but I'm having trouble reading the articles in Dagens Nyheter or Aftonbladet...so went on Babbel.com and signed up for Swedish. It seems so easy and relaxing--great fun working with the language every day. And I'm sure as I progress I'll be able to build up my vocabulary again.  It's been years since I lived  there, but this is giving me a yen to go back and see all the tourist spots that I never visited because I was working all the time. And to practice the language, of course.

[dougules]

My family just got back from a trip to Morocco (Darijan Arabic) and Paris (French).  I took one semester of French in HS, and most things came back quickly - but with one semester - it didn't help a whole lot.  We took a language class in Morocco - that was fun - and we learned many greetings and things of the sort.  Pretty practical stuff.

Almost everyone in Morocco speaks French also - as it is actually the official language of the country - being a former French colony.  This got my wife and I wondering - if you were to learn 3 or 4 languages to hopefully communicate in a large portion of the world, what would they be?  I was thinking English (since I already have this language), Spanish (most of Central and South America and Spain.), French (lots of french colonies throughout the entire world).  So I think that covers most of the Americas, Europe, Australia, Pacific Islands, Caribbean, and I suspect most of Africa. 

It seems that Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, and a popular Arabic dialect language would round out most of Asia.  But I know very little about Asia and could be completely wrong.

It was a bit of a shell shock to me to find out that in Europe most countries have their own language.  I knew it - but I had never experienced it.  In the US everyone for 3000 miles across a solid body of land speak the same language.  In Europe - you go just about anywhere and they speak a completely different language.  In Morocco - you can travel less than 100 km and everyone is speaking a completely different version of Arabic.  It's a wonder how anything gets done in those places.

Portuguese is the number 6 language in the world.  Brazil is huge, and then Portugal had a smattering of other colonies in Africa and Asia.  Plus Portuguese is like the buy-one-get-one-50%-off of languages since it's so similar to Spanish. 

Aside from China being such a major country, I've encountered situations in unexpected places where knowing Mandarin would have been useful.  The only restaurant open on a Catholic holiday in Italy, a souvenir shop in Peru, and laundry in Panama, aside from tons of immigrant-run businesses in the US and Canada. 

I think most folks in the smaller countries in Europe know English and/or one of the other major European languages.

[JetBlast]

I have found learning languages to be an interesting way to pass time at the hotel while at work. I used to use the Duolingo app, but I have found I like Memrise better. I managed to get a 1 year membership for 50% off, so pretty reasonable for the amount I'll use it. Currently learning French and Japanese. I think Arabic might be next on the list. I've heard it's a very logical language and easy to pick up once you know the alphabet.


I took five years of Spanish back in middle and high school, but have lost a fair amount of it. I'll try to read newspapers or watch a bit of Telemumdo or Univision to knock off the cobwebs, but really need to immerse myself in a Spanish speaking country for a bit to get it back.

[VolcanicArts]

I've been motivated more than usual since I started this thread. I have been able to average 1.5 hrs per day on Spanish, and I also met up with a native speaker and was able to freely converse with them. So far so good, I think at the level I'm at about 500 more hrs to get the common words and tenses down and be proficient. I created a chart to track how much time I'm putting in and what type of study method.