Which language should you learn?
How to make the choice
In discussions of learning another language, you will often see a question come up: Which one should I learn? Numerous articles try to rationally account for that, tell you the top ten tongues to learn, rank languages by utility or number of speakers or GDP of the countries its spoken in. Where are populations growing most? Which tongues will give you most ‘bang for your buck’?
German, a language I’ve spent a lot of my adult life learning, often features on such lists, an inclusion rendered in my experience ridiculous by the preference for Germans to opt for stilted international English in international or even just mixed-nationality environments. If there are fifteen people in a meeting and one doesn’t speak German, the Germans will do everything in English. A shame in my view.
In reality, this question can only be answered by a highly individual and subjective metric: Which language are you attracted to?
Spanish is a world language and Basque a tiny and regional one but if it’s the latter that more appeals to you, you will have better outcomes when learning it. Learning a language as an adult takes an enormous amount of effort and for all but the most perfectionist learner a good deal of humiliation, and what will get you through that process is an overweening love for the language and its language culture. You have to long to use the language at every opportunity.
It affects your attitude to your progress, too; my Chinese is much more rudimentary than my French, but after living with a Chinese person for seven years, I feel an affinity to the language and the Chinese people that means Chinese sits deeper, when I use my few phrases, to the French I speak every day – even tho my knowledge is miserable in comparison. I wouldn’t say I feel either particularly Chinese or French, but of those two options I definitely feel more Chinese.
Indeed, French is a supreme example of a language I’ve had to learn for career purposes. My mother is a Francophile, I was sent to French lessons as a child and, for the purposes of my interpreting career, I’ve been relentlessly incentivized to learn the language. It remains in my view the second most useful language professionally in the world. And yet, tho I speak the language fluently, I feel no particular affinity to the French-speaking world, and, tho I am determined to minimize both my mistakes and mispronunciations, I have no particular problem with people perceiving me as what I am, a foreigner who speaks decent French.