What language should I learn first? This is a question I get asked very often. It is an important question and it is worth spending some time over it before you start on that language learning journey.

As a general rule I recommend an easy and useful language as your first foreign language.

• An easy languages can be learned in under a year of regular study.  Such languages share many words with English and do not have ghost trains of grammatical horrors. Look at my difficulty table to get a rough indication of  language difficulties (ratings apply to a monolingual native English speaker). You can learn an easy language in 300 to 600 hours of work versus more than 2000 hours for a 'hard' language.
• A useful languages  are much easier to learn and to remember. Such languages include English, Spanish, French and many others. If you stop learning foreign languages after your first, you'll be glad to be stuck with a useful language that will be compatible with as many new interests you will develop in life. If you speak only Sanskrit, you'd better like Indian classics all your life because there is not much else you can do with this language. If you learn French or Spanish, you can travel to dozens of countries, listen to songs, read books, newspapers, watch TV and use it for business or with friends. Such a language will serve you all your life.

Now if you have a 100 pounds brain or are consumed by an inextinguishable passion for Sanskrit or Mongolian, go for it. We have on the forum several people who successfully learned difficult languages at a very young age. Maybe you will be the next one, but keep in mind that it is easier to capitalize on the self-confidence acquired by having successfully taught yourself an easy language than to decide you really can't learn the difficult language you had chosen and quietly move on to an easier language.

Also, if you learn a first language fast and well, learning another one becomes a very attractive thing to do. The choice you make of studying one language versus another becomes just a matter of when you learn it. But if you choose a hard language as your first foreign language and fail, you run a high risk of becoming discouraged and losing all hope of ever learning a foreign languages.

Sure, teenagers just love the idea of studying an obscure language, but most of those who start on such a language quietly stop after a few months and are never heard from again.

When you start your foreign language learning 'career', you can't know with absolute certainty how efficient a learner you will be. How much time and attention you can consistently devote to the language.

Make sure you choose a language on which you can realistically spend the necessary hours to learn it.