I’m having a Language Learning Crisis! Or maybe I should say I can’t choose what language to learn next!
I reached a place with German where I am really happy, and don’t feel any need to really keep intentionally trying to improve. I was thinking maybe I can resume French and get it up to the next milestone of 30K known words. But I’m not really sure if I want to.
I have been messing with the idea of learning Mandarin! There are sooooo many mandarin Speakers out there, and I have been able to find a lot of interesting content on YT with relative ease (which is important to me. Steve once said “Interesting content is what drives language learning.” which is soooo true.)
A few weeks ago I was really feeling like I was finally going to either start learning Swedish or Norwegian (Languages I have been wanting to learn for so so long.) But to my disappointment I just cannot find that many YouTubers in either of these languages. I tried so hard to find the type of videos that I like and it just feels like it doesn’t exist. I feel sad because finding content on YT is what motivates me to keep going. So I don’t know. I feel so discouraged to learn these languages because there just isn’t that much content. I’ve found quite a bit of podcasts, but finding YT channels is also really important to me.
I have been thinking about picking up Arabic again. I started learning Arabic and Hebrew when I was young. (These were the first languages that I started learning, kicking off my Love for languages). I ended up dropping Arabic and going for Hebrew for many years. Took Hebrew quite far. So many of the tv shows had a transctrupt but it was always embedded into the video so i was never able to import them into LingQ. So I manually typed everything in to LingQ. Gosh that took forever, but I got really good at typing in Hebrew.
Eventually dropped Hebrew for French. When I first started learning French.
(And this is not a joke!!) I thought LingQ had a bug. Because when I clicked on a word I could never hear the last few letters of the word. It just didn’t occur to me that that’s how French is! Hhahhhahaah later when I found out that that’s just how french is I was laughing at myself for weeks!
But now going back to Arabic it feels like seeing an old friend. Reading Right to left, no vowels. So Semitic feeling I love it!
But I can’t help but be reminded why I dropped Arabic in the first place in that is because there are just so many Dialects and trying to find content in the dialect I want is just such a pain. and not to mention there is such a drought of content on YT. So I don’t know if i’ll pursue Arabic, even though the Arabic Script is amazing looking!
Now we have Russian! Good ole Russian. Another Language I have been putting off for so long. Sooooo much content on YT in Russian! Which is a huge incentive!
(I think Russian is what i’m going to Choose!)
There’s also Italian which is a language I started on Lingq very early on. It seemed like an easier language compared to others. But something about it just doesn’t feel foreign enough to keep me interested long term.
Recently I have discovered Portuguese! Wow! What an interesting sounding language! Tons of speakers in the world. But again maybe not foreign enough to keep my attention long term.
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This is anecdote is oh so relatable. 
It seems like you are looking for a language that is 1. sufficiently novel, 2. has a lot of speakers, and 3. has a lot of interesting content available. Based on your own assessment above, it seems that Russian and Mandarin best fit those criteria.
Like you, I am easily interested in languages. I also find it hard to sustain motivation and invest time if I’m not going to incorporate the language into my life in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to me. Perhaps your vision of a best case future might provide more information with which to choose?
How do you ultimately envision yourself incorporating the language into your life, best case scenario? Is content king? Is conversation more important? Do you plan to travel or move to the country? Is there a population of native speakers near you? Will you make friends? Date? Do business?
So, I answered your request with a bunch of questions… 
Sorry! It’s so personal and hard to choose!
Good luck!
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It depends what your motivation for learning languages is. If you’re a traveler like me, then the most important languages to learn are those that give you the ability to speak and understand over the widest area of land. With this in mind, I created three lists of languages based on number of speakers, land area, and a combination of the two. Here are the results:
Languages Ranked by Number of Speakers
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English
379 million native, 1.132 billion total speakers
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Mandarin Chinese – English taught in school
917 million native, 1.117 billion total speakers
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Hindi - India - English taught in school
341 million native, 615 million total speakers
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Spanish
460 Million native, 534 million total speakers
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Standard Arabic - French, English taught in school
315 million native, 422 million total speakers
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French
280 million total speakers
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Bengali - India - Hindi, English taught in school
228 million native, 265 million total speakers
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Russian
153 million native, 258 million total speakers
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Portuguese - English, Spanish taught in school
220 million native, 234 million total speakers
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Indonesian – English taught in school
199 million total speakers
Languages Spoken in More Than 1% of the World’s Land Area
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English
23%
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Russian
11%
-
Arabic (Fre/Eng)
10%
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French
9%
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Spanish
8%
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Portuguese (Eng/Spa)
7%
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Chinese (Eng)
6%
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Hindi (Eng)
2%
Languages Optimized for Number of Speakers and Land Area
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English 26.0
379 million native speakers
1.132 billion total speakers
23% land area
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Mandarin Chinese 6.7
917 million native speakers
1.117 billion total speakers
6% land area
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Spanish 4.27 (~10.2 w/Port)
460 Million native speakers
534 million total speakers
8% land area
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Standard Arabic 4.22
315 million native speakers
422 million total speakers
10% land area
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Russian 2.8
153 million native speakers
258 million total speakers
11% land area
-
French 2.5
76 million native speakers
280 million total speakers
9% land area
With these six languages, a person can communicate with over 50% of the world’s population in 67% of the world’s land area. These six languages also happen to be the six official languages of the United Nations. Adding Hindi and Portuguese would add another 10% of population and another 9% of land area.
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I’d consider sheet music, math, a programming language or Ancient Albanian Sign Language as the only viable options.
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I had never considered land area. This made me think of this quote from pulp fiction:
Sounds fun to me!
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Not sure how good any of these are…or if they fit with the kind of things you like, but here’s a list:
Top 20 Youtube Influencers in Norway: Find Norwegian Youtubers (modash.io)
You might ping @noxialisrex as he’s learned all the scandanavian languages to some degree. I’m not sure how much he checks out youtube though…mostly I think he reads and uses audibooks.
There are certainly plenty of tv shows and movies (not sure how easily accessible or not).
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It will be easier to choose a language from the perspective you and others have posted. But the reality is that you need clarity. Something I had to go through myself as well on this regard.
You need to find your why, otherwise you will repeat the same outcomes.
Hint: choose the language that makes you joyful. Delete all numbers, choose for love. There! I said it! 
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I have been here many times. Afrikaans was a nightmare to try and get going. There’s really almost no resources outside of Southern Africa or the Benelux. But yeah, I really love language learning. Still beyond Afrikaans I haven’t had any language I wanted to learn truly.
So I know your pain, and I think what worked for me was just shifting this on its head. You talk a lot about struggling to find resources that are useful in your TL. But shouldn’t it maybe be the opposite? What I usually do is go online and browse books on goodreads.com. There I find books I wanna buy and read and then I immediately start reading them. I don’t bother with the language at that point I’m just trying to read the book. In most languages so far I’ve not read more than one or two books before switching to another. Yes, I would probably be fluent in Russian, French, or Romanian by now had I just focused on one. But I really didn’t see a point in any of them beyond what I was doing right then. Afrikaans has finally gotten doable on LingQ. The dictionaries no longer suck and it’s way easier to read.
My point being, perhaps you shouldn’t marry a language before you’ve gotten to know it? Don’t worry what you learn from any language probably carries over, the cases in Romanian helped my Russian, the French I’ve learned has filled in the non-German gaps in my Afrikaans. (since Dutch has traded with French.) Maybe look after good YouTubers who fill a niche you don’t have in your current languages, and learn those languages. Or focus on a smaller one. Lebanese and Levantine Arabic is so small but unfortunately due to war, perhaps fortunately for you. It is now over-represented in the diaspora. That was a big part of my Romanian adventure. Learning to communicate with people in my neighborhoods here in Sweden and across Europe. Usually people from the Balkan never have anyone learn their language. So they are eager to get to know you.
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I’m really enjoying reading all of your replies. I started learning Mandarin using the app Chineasy this past week. I don’t know if anyone of you are familiar with it. It essentially teaches you characters through pictures.
I am finding it to be so so fun!
Is this a good way to learn characters?
Is there a better way?
Is learning characters what I should be focusing on right now?
I feel like just jumping into Chinese on LingQ is way too tough right now. languages that are similar to English you can just do that and be fine, but characters of course are just a whole world different than English. I can’t help but feel the itch to start Russian, but I think im just gonna stick with Chinese for a little while and see how it goes. I like what one of you guys said. You don’t have to marry a language before you even get to know them.
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Personally recommend Lingq but never used any other app to learn chinese. It’s only about given your brain enough time to adapt and get used to the characters. Same as if you meet someone for the first time. You know what they look like (characters) but you don’t have information or know anything about them (tones, meaning, pinyin) in which you have to interact with them. You’re not gonna remember that person in one go unless that person leaves a deep impression in you. In this case, being acquanted with few thousand people as soon as you can! The more you see the characters, the easier it is to acqure it. Usually about 9-25x in different context. Don’t rush or force the process. The beginning is always the hardest but snowballs extremelyyy fast later down the line. Especially for mandarin chinese
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I learned Chinese for three years in high school. Here are some key takeaways from it.
Characters (this will be controversial) don’t need to be learned in and out unless that’s specifically what you want. Ask yourself now if you want to be able to, and if you see yourself needing, to learn how to write these characters by hand.
If that’s the case, buy several tian ge ben from a Chinese mass retailer like Alibaba (really cheap ngl). It helps you follow all the principles of writing, and Steve Kaufman, and me personally would say that’s the best way to learn characters.
If the answer is no, then you kinda only really need to learn the pinyin for characters to type them out on your phone or keyboard, and to recognize the sounds. the word 世界 means world, shijie. I never learned that in high school, still, I recognize it just as well. You’ll be really strong at recognition by doing that but your pronounciation might be a lil shoddy.
My end note here is that, my friend who went to Tsinghua, and my Chinese teacher both kinda told me that the writing Chinese by hand-skill has started to diminish amongst youth. Unless you do it often you get rusty. With the advent of the internet and technology the smaller details are more easy to forget even for natives. Definitely do learn how to read characters though, even if just recognition, it’s super fun, I love it even if I am like HSK2 in that department.
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