I just joined today, and it was mainly to ask this question here where I know there are many polyglots or aspiring polyglots. I was raised with both English and Spanish, so for a long time I felt being bilingual was adequate. In high school, I started working on getting to a more advanced level in Spanish, since all I had was the basic things you learn at home. In the process, I started thinking that it might be fun to learn a third language.
In September I started learning Japanese, which I mostly picked because I like the way it sounds and I wanted to learn a language unrelated to the European language group. I’ve learned about 1500 kanji (but more than half are passive memory only), and I think I’m currently at what Steve calls the second stage, with “Less than 10% unknown words in most conversations,” although that percentage increases significantly if the conversation is about a subject I have little knowledge in. All in all, it’s been a lot easier than I expected, especially after hearing how hard Japanese is. I think the grammar is much simpler than Spanish, and the kanji make it easier to remember vocabulary words.
Now that I’ve realized how fun and rewarding learning a new language can be, I’m sure that I don’t want to limit myself to just three. However, I’m having trouble finding another one that meets my somewhat picky qualifications: something I like the sound of, from a region whose culture I’m interested in, and that has a lot of interesting media available online for free. I considered learning another Romance language, since that would be the easiest, but I don’t like the sound of French, and I haven’t found anything in Portuguese or Italian that I’m interested in. I considered Mandarin, but I don’t really have much interest in Chinese culture, so it would be hard to stay motivated.
I guess I was lucky to pick Japanese, since there seems to be a huge overseas community of fans that are willing to write transcripts and translations for drama cds, subtitles for everything, and even novel translations. Even though a lot of the material available is breaking copyright laws, I can’t really object since as an unemployed student there’s no other way I could have acquired hundreds of hours of drama cds, audio books, radio shows, and music, not to mention plenty of dramas, manga, and light novels.
Obviously by the time I’m ready to start another language, I should have some disposable income to spend on it, which will make the “available online for free” qualification less important in the future. So what I’m mainly looking for here is just for you guys to throw some ideas my way; tell me what’s awesome about your language (or the language you’re studying) and why I should be interested in it.
