Which Language Should I learn? (+ A Little Bit Of My Journey)

Which language should I learn next? What is the easiest language? is Arabic easy? these are some questions I got recently and after I answered them I decided to write about them here and add a little bit of my story.

Which language should I learn Next?

A long time ago when I was at a “nice” level of English, I asked the question, which language should I learn now? I had an interest in many languages and decided to learn Japanese, after some time of struggling to learn how to write, I mean after I faced the first difficulties, I found out that I have no great interests in it, no goals, or a clear way, so I stopped, notice here that with the lack of real desire and goals, doubt comes fast!

After that, I saw some friends learning German, and I was like: I can learn German too, they aren’t better than me bla bla… And guess what, I stopped again after a short period of time because I have no interest at all!

I tried to learn Spanish too at that time and, long story short, I stopped again, why? You guessed it right, I had no interest in it. You can see that I wasn’t gifted a “language gene” or something.

After a while, my vision changed, and I decided to read more in my language (Arabic) and re-learn English! This time on my own, online and focusing on communication, I tried to practice English as much as I can: talk to people online, watch movies, listen to music, and even for my studies I used to make research in English, you may ask why to read more in my native language, believe me, the answer is this simple: to expand my vision of the world!

Meanwhile, I’ve known so many friends around the world, learned about their cultures and a lot of things, I had fun with it, and then, an interest in the Spanish language started to appear, and found myself starting to learn it and repeating that amazing process (that was after I felt really confident speaking English)…

The moral of this story is that only you who will know which language you’ll start next, your interests and goals with it will make you decide, and of course a good English 😉

What is the easiest language?

Another thing, if you think you should learn a language only because you think it’s “easy”, I’m here to tell you something: no language is easy! Sorry if that broke your heart but let me explain to you:

Let’s say you’re a Portuguese speaker, even Spanish, if you don’t like it, it would be not just so hard for you, but impossible to learn.

It’s not like “i think i want to learn the X language, let’s search if it’s easy” No!

You have to know why you want to learn it, what would you like to achieve with it, goals; maybe travel, meet new people, study abroad, listen to your favorite band in their language, discover new cultures, read books in that language… Whatever the reason might be.

If you really want to learn a language, even if it’s so hard, (for example Arabic or Chinese) you have to find clear reasons, strong ones, and keeping the goals in your mind will make the road more clear.

In high school, I had a friend that told me she found Chinese easy to learn, and tones aren’t hard! I used to think she had a language gene lol, but seriously, she told me this while I had trouble making good sentences in English, I didn’t understand this, it was like she was talking in Chinese (it’s an expression in Morocco to say we don’t understand something) -and yes she does-.

I know many other people that speak languages that are extremely hard and different from theirs, for example, I have a friend that is a native Spanish speaker and learned to speak Moroccan Arabic! Asians that speak Arabic too, Latinos that speak German, Turkish… Moroccans that speak Korean or Chinese…

And so many others, I know them personally not just heard of them, this thing is real, and they are normal people like me and you. And they don’t have a “language gene”.