Lingua
The choice feels enormous because it looks permanent. It is not: two months into the wrong language you will know, and two months is a cheap experiment. Still, there is a way of choosing that makes month three more likely to happen, and it is not the way most lists recommend, because most lists rank languages by the number of speakers, which is the one factor that will never once get you out of bed on a Tuesday.
Key points
- Three forces decide: desire, usefulness and difficulty. Desire wins ties, because it is the only one that still works when the novelty is gone.
- Difficulty is mostly distance from the languages you already know, and it is measurable: the professional estimates range from about 600 hours to about 2,200 for an English speaker.
- Choose for a person, a place or a body of work you already love. "Useful" is an argument you will lose to a Tuesday evening.
The three forces
Desire. Something you want to read, watch, sing or say to somebody. This is not sentimentality; it is the fuel supply. Every learner hits a month where nothing improves, and at that point the only thing left is wanting it.
Usefulness. Your partner's family, a market you sell into, a country you will live in, a literature you want unmediated. Useful is powerful when it is specific and useless when it is general.
Difficulty. How far the language is from what you already speak, which sets how many hours you need. Difficulty does not decide whether you can, only how long it takes, so it belongs in the plan rather than in the decision.
If two candidates tie on usefulness, take the one you would enjoy failing at.
How difficulty is actually measured
The most-cited numbers come from the Foreign Service Institute, which trains diplomats full time and publishes how long its courses take to reach professional working proficiency. For an English speaker, the closest languages take roughly 600 to 750 class hours, and Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic take about 2,200. Three things drive the gap: a different writing system, a grammar with categories your language does not have, and a vocabulary with no shared roots to lend you free words.
| Language | Hours for an English speaker | What is hard | What is easier than you expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | About 600 to 750 | Subjunctive, two past tenses, speed of speech | Spelling is phonetic, vocabulary is half familiar |
| French | About 600 to 750 | Listening: spelling and sound diverge, liaison | Huge shared vocabulary, simple word order |
| English | Varies by first language | Spelling, phrasal verbs, stress patterns | No cases, no gender, immense free input |
| Vietnamese | About 1,100 | Six tones, vowels that pair up | Latin script, no conjugation, no plurals, no cases |
| Russian | About 1,100 | Six cases, verb aspect, stress that moves | Cyrillic takes a week, spelling is regular, no articles |
| Japanese | About 2,200 | Kanji, politeness levels, word order | Pronunciation is simple, kana are learnable in two weeks |
| Korean | About 2,200 | Honorifics, particles, verb endings | Hangul in a few hours, very regular grammar |
Two notes on that table. The hours assume intensive full-time study and do not divide neatly into evenings, so use them as ratios rather than as promises. And the script, the part beginners fear most, is never the expensive part: two weeks of learning a new alphabet against two years of grammar.
Choosing for a reason that lasts
- For a person. A partner, their parents, friends you want to talk to without an interpreter. The strongest reason there is, because the practice is built in.
- For a place you will actually be in. Not "somewhere I would like to visit one day" but a country you go to, or intend to live in.
- For a body of work. A literature, a cinema, a music, a research field. Inexhaustible material at every level.
- For work, when it is concrete. A named market, a named client, a named promotion. "Good for business" in the abstract is not a reason.
What not to choose on
Speaker counts, which say nothing about whether you will ever meet one. Prestige, which fades by week six. "The easiest one", which gets you a language you did not want in less time. And the promise of a language in three months, which sets a deadline you will fail and call a personal failing, when the honest arithmetic is in how long it takes.
The two-week test drive
Give the shortlist two weeks each, at fifteen minutes a day: the script, the first fifty words, ten sentences you can actually say. What you are testing is not aptitude but pull. Which one do you find yourself thinking about in the queue? Which alphabet did you enjoy tracing? A language that bores you in the test drive will not improve at month five.
In LinguaPair
All seven languages are courses here, in any pairing, so the test drive is free and the switch costs nothing: A0 and A1 are free in every course, which is more than the fifty words and ten sentences above. Every course opens with its writing system, so Cyrillic, hangul, kana and the Vietnamese tone marks are taught as the first level rather than assumed. The level test places you if you have studied before, and if you are choosing together with somebody, the app is built for the case where you learn each other's language at the same time, which turns the choice into two courses and one shared streak.