Lately I?ve been thinking a lot about languages. I was lucky enough to be brought up with two mother languages, English and French, but for a while I took this for granted and didn?t really practise my French (living in England) unless I actually visited France, so it became rusty and my grammar was awful. Around a year ago I started taking much more of an interest in this background and started teaching myself all the gaps I?d left unfilled. Still working on it, especially the written aspects, but I?m almost at the point where I can?t really become any more fluent unless I actually go and live in a francophone area for a while (which I intend to do at some point). From here though, I?ve been thinking about learning another language (but I have no idea how I?d go about it).
So my question is, if you could learn another language, ignoring all the work that would come into it, which would you want to learn?
Not gonna include English cos if you hang about these forums I?m gonna presume most people can speak it at least pretty well, but even then it?s hard to include a wide variety of languages on these narrow polls so just look at it as a basis for specifics and why you?d pick that language. Gonna lump together a few to avoid having a ridiculously large ?Other? bar (even if it blurs specific choices).
But as an extra to people whose first language isn?t English, did you learn it out of choice and if not, would you have preferred to learn another language?
I think I?d pick Spanish, Portuguese or Mandarin. Always been interested in travelling around Latin America (already been once but I wanna go back) and I?m going to Mozambique next year but China interests me too, and it?s spoken in a few other areas I might want to go to. Problem is, it seems really hard to learn for latin based speakers.
Last thing, if you have taught yourself a new language, how did you do it?
Just thought all this would be interesting to hear.
o/
