Foreign Language....?

[Combat_Boot]

Okay. So, I'm kind of at a loss. Lately, I've been wanting to learn a foreign language, and I'm allowed to get a tutor from the local university to teach me. The only problem is that I don't know WHAT exact language I want to learn first. I want something that'll help me communicate with the boarding students at my school, since most are in ESL.
They mostly speak Mexican/Spanish, Japanese, Chinese or Korean. Mind you, I'd love to learn any foreign language.
Anyhow, which language is probably best to learn first? Because I have no idea. I was thinking something Asian, but I don't know.

[Christopher]

Do Japanese, its good. Then you can do all sorts of useful things such as raid Japan for computers, or watch unsubbed anime.

[o_0]

Or you could do Spanish.

Spanish *is*, after all, a Romance language, so with it you will also sort of understand Italian, French, and others. Or, rather, many of the words will sound similar.

[Rachel]

Or you could do Spanish.

Spanish *is*, after all, a Romance language, so with it you will also sort of understand Italian, French, and others. Or, rather, many of the words will sound similar.

thats true, i learnt some french and it allowed me to understand spanish who wants to be a millionaire.

[Base]

It depends what you want to do with it. If you want to learn the most spoken laguage, try Chinese. Japanese does have that anime advantage, and the Romance languages are pretty versitile because they're all so similar. Or if you like history, you could do Greek or Latin. Latin has the added bonus of being the mother or all Romance languages. Or if you want to learn a new alphabet you could do Arabic or Sanscrit, or the Asian languages for that matter. If you want to impress people, learn one of those African languages that involve those awesome clicking noises. A counselor at my camp did tounge twisters in one of those, and we were all like .

So, it's really an easy choice!

Ok, not that helpful, but still. Just choose what you really want from a language, get a list that meet that criteria, then choose one at random, if you can't decide.

[Sapphire Faerie]

Of those, Spanish would probably be the easiest to learn. Take Spanish =D

(You know Chris, for people like me that prefer Mexican movies over Anime, Spanish has the advantage ;P **goes off to watch El Crimen del padre Amaro**)

[Yoshi]

If you want an Asian language that's easier to pick up, go for Japanese. If you insist on Chinese, take Mandarin- although both Mandarin and Cantonese share the same characters and there are millions of them, Mandarin also has a pinyin system which makes pronounciations easier.

I'm not sure about Korean, however. O_o

[o_0]

Speaking of characters, Spanish is easy because it only has an alphabet.

And once you get the basic pronunciation of the vowel sounds down, you can say anything that's written.

[Qanda]

Take Mandarin (or Chinese, whatever). It is most useful due to China, the "rising dragon". Furthermore Chinese is probably the most-spoken Asian language, and there are predictions that there will soon be more Chinese than English webpages on the internet.

Japanese is good only if you are an anime or Japan fan, IMO.

[Combat_Boot]

Well, in that case....
I have absolutely NO idea. *spins*
Supposedly Chinese is realllllllly hard though.
I already do French, I'd love Spanish....
WHY CAN I ONLY DO ONE LANGUAGE!?!?!?!?

[Dragonfire]

I've heard that if you take French first any other language you learn after that is easy. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I'm taking French right now. And, since French is a Romance language like the others said, it's even easier to understand/learn Spanish, Italian, etc.

[Sock]

I'd say take Spanish. Depending on where you live, it could help you out a lot.

I'm taking Japanese right now. Personally, it's difficult for me to understand, write, and speak (especially since I took the classes at seven AM). The only way I can understand it is picking out a few different words from the sentence and stringing them into something logical. ('Ok, that word means likes and that word means doesn't and that word means cake. So someone doesn't like cake.') I really don't like it much - I wish I had taken Spanish instead.

Korean...the alphabet is insane. My friend tried to teach me a bit and they looked all the same to me, personally. A lot of the letters seem to be just very slightly different. It's also really hard to pronounce (for me, at least).

If I were in your position, I'd probably take Spanish.

[Alex]

Apparently Chinese is the easiest to pick up, in terms of being able to speak it fluently. From what I remember, it wasn't too hard to learn.

[Ski]

I'd choose Spanish. It really isn't as hard to learn as the others. Also, it's helpful to know th #2 language in the U.S. (assuming you're there)

[TDG]

German. It's so much better than those options XD