albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4393 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German
| Message 1 of 4 01 November 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged |
Which should i learn? I know it is a personal choice , the fact is that i cant make up my mind ,i like all of
them . Russian is somewhat of a challenge because of its complexity, it is spoken almost in an entire
continent and it is also pretty useful , higly time demanding , perhaps i dont have all the time that is
recquired to get a decenct level in it. Swedish isnt probably so useful but i like its sound and in addition is
a Germanic language so it must be interesting to learn ,since i have already a solid foundation in both
english and German and i could compare them . French is probably the easiest being an Italian , maybe
less challenging , probably the most useful and still it is the expression of a very rich culture .
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sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4641 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin
| Message 2 of 4 01 November 2013 at 6:13pm | IP Logged |
Go for French. Close to Italian, the second most widespread language after English in the world and second in Europe after German, and an awesome literary and film history. Also, France/Belgium/Quebec have some pretty fantastic music scenes ranging from electro to hip hop to pop.
Edited by sillygoose1 on 01 November 2013 at 6:16pm
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Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4618 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish
| Message 3 of 4 02 November 2013 at 12:37am | IP Logged |
Don't go for French. First of all it will get you bored, just because you'll find it a piece of cake and that will go up to the point where it simply won't feel challenging enough. I mean I speak French and if I put my brain cells together I could understand fairly well newspapers in Italian and so on. Of course, French is more widely spread, and German, French and Italian are a classic combination in Switzerland, and for sure you'll be able to use it in Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg etc.
Rather, go for Swedish - it sounds nice, it will be challenging for you, but not overwhelming. It sounds nice and it definitely has more of an "exotic" feeling to it, which is definitely not something that can be told for French. Swedish also has one very big benefit - once you master, or at least get a intermediate level at it, you'll be able to understand well Danish and Norwegian as well, which is a HUGE benefit, since once you're ab;e to communicate in Swedish you'll be understood in pretty much entire Scandinavia. And given you have a solid foundation in German, combine that with Swedish and Dutch will become a piece of cake.
Being biased towards Russian, I would have suggested that you go for it, but since you're afraid it would be too much of an overkill, I wouldn't advise you to. Of course Russian can open up a huge door for you, once you achieve a reasonable level in it, meaning that you'll most likely will be able to understand quite well Ukrainian and Belorussian to a huge extent and to a lesser one Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian.
But that being said if you don't have a solid foundation in a Slavic language going for Russian from point 0 is, indeed quite challenging, simply because the better you get, the harder it becomes. It's also very tricky and can literally drive you nuts sometimes. On the plus side - it's worth every second of the effort.
All in all, once again - go for Swedish. They do have that term, called lagom, meaning something like "moderate". And it really is that - it's the perfect middle ground between no effort and too much effort.
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albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4393 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German
| Message 4 of 4 02 November 2013 at 10:16am | IP Logged |
Good suggestion ,thanks !
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