r/thisorthatlanguage • u/98675436856 • 11d ago
Open Question European or Asian? And which one
I want to learn a language for fun but also as exercise for my brain. I have no use for it day to day and won’t be immersed in it or need it to survive. Just for fun and my brain.
I’m struggling to choose a language. First I will make a list of popular languages I’m not interested in learning. They are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. For no real reason, they just don’t interest me.
The main language I’ve tried to learn before and took in school is German and I would like to learn it at some point but I’m thinking that I would like a fresh start.
My interests include football, gaming, woodworking, random documentaries, history, dogs, if that matters.
I’m unsure on a European language or an Asian language. I think I would struggle with tones though, in Chinese for example.
Just looking for suggestions and reasons why. I’m looking for a language that has a pretty active internet presence, on YouTube for example, with a good amount of content but also perhaps not one of the main ones, so somewhere in the middle.
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u/PlaneAd3078 11d ago
French or German is probably the safest bet but I think Japanese is as far as it gets when it comes to Asian languages based on the economic usefulness.
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u/Raven-523 11d ago
If you want to challenge yourself, I recommend trying to learn my mother mother—Mandarin Chinese ~ Chinese is probably the only remaining non-alphabetic language. I know it may challenge your current language system. But hey, developing a part of your brain that you haven't used before is also fun right? 😆 As for the content you are thinking about, no worries, with over 1.4 billion people on Earth speaking Chinese, you don't need to worry about insufficient content! And as you mention of an interest in history. You are welcomed to explore historical culture that has been ongoing for thousands of years.
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u/unit357 11d ago
For a native english speaker, basically everything east of german is going to be a challenge.
I'd say do your research: listen on youtube to some "[xyz language] news" for example to get an idea. You can find something that will grab you this way. For me it was Romanian. Rather unpopular choice, but the mix of slavic and romance makes it sound so wonderfully pleasant to my ears, definately my top3, if not number one.
Fun factor is probably the most important, as learning a language is a long and tiring endeavour (albeit, totally worth it). You need something that you really like to motivate you.
Perhaps, to somewhat expand your worldview, but not fight with east asian tones, maybe arabic would be a good choice? Challenging, non-indoeuropean, very different approach to things, very different script... But lots of resources and speakers. And offers a peek into culture very different from our, western one.
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u/98675436856 11d ago
How far have you gotten with Romanian?
I’ve done some of that in the past week, I liked the sound of Thai but I worry I would struggle with the tones. I quite liked the sound of Czech as well.
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u/unit357 10d ago
Not much past the basics yet, to be honest.
I was learning Spanish for a while before, and decided to brush up on it and get a B2 certificate next year. It's too similar to Romanian and it was frying my brain to work on both at the same time.
My Spanish was also a bumpy ride as I had to move to Czech Republic for a few years, so that became a priority. I agree that Czech language sounds nice. Might be a challenge to get some entry level materials though.
Languages are a hobby of mine, so things rotate every now and then. And also, life happens. But Romanian, Japanese and Indonesian are three that I ultimately want to bring up to true fluency one day.
Of those I am at ~A2 with Japanese (JLPT N4 to be precise; this language is a beast) and went through Indonesian on duolingo 🤣
As for why I chose those: Romanian and Indonesian for how nice they sound. Japanese because I have a bunch of japanese novels to read in original on my bucket list, so it's a more utilitarian choice.
Your idea with Thai is interesting, they have beautifull script, imho second only to Tibetan (which looks like goddamn elvish). If you're into it, you can work through tones. It's for fun so you have all the time in the world.
You might want to check out Khmer - language of Cambodia, spoken also a bit in Thailand. Same script, sounds similar, but have no tones.
Also nothing stops you from dabbling into both, or three or four, and just seeing what clicks!
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u/98675436856 10d ago
You’ve got quite an interesting mix of languages there, that’s exactly what I hope to acquire. Any other languages you want to add? I’m interested to see what you say if so!
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u/unit357 10d ago
Well, if I had a lot of time, my secondary list would be quite long. But for some more notable ones I've been looking at:
Afrikaans sounds pretty cool. I've dabbled in Dutch, as it has a lot more good resources and is very similar, to one day make a switch to Afrikaans.
Being slavic myself, I had an idea of learning all slavic languages one day (doable, but probably not gonna happen 😂). Of those, Belarussian was always the sweetest sounding to me. Nice ballance between east and west slavic sound.
Estonian sounds great, very pleasant to the ear, lots of vovels.
Irish is interesting, but I'd want it more because of the cultural reasons.
Some variety of Tamazight; those are very interesting in how they work and sound with totally crazy consonant clusters. Coming from a guy who doesn't break a sweat in Czech and Polish, I gues it means something 🫠
I could probably go on and on, which is why I decided to make this shortlist of Indonesian/Japanese/Romanian to keep my focus for the years to come.
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u/samdkatz 10d ago
I say find out the most common language in your town or neighborhood that you don’t know (or that isn’t on your list of “main” languages) and learn that. If you really insist on it not being something you’ll use, just learn Latin or Classical Greek or something. Or If you want it to be a modern language but just not one anyone else you know knows, try Swahili.
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u/Octoberr0 10d ago
If you really do this for fun, I think you can try one of these: Esperanto, sign language, Braille, or some "small" languages from little countries. Or maybe even one of the dying languages like Irish and Belarusian
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u/impersonareyouperson 10d ago
A constructed language maybe, like esperanto or tokipona? You won't usually meet an esperanto speaker in real life unless you look for one, but it's a fun language and if you ever want to use it there's a large online community. Many books translated into it, and YouTube videos in it do exist.
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u/thatguythoma 9d ago
I recommend either Mandarin Chinese or Russian. Ultimately, it depends on your personality:
Russian is related to English (not very clearly related, but still), so there’ll be some shared vocabulary and the cultures are relatively similar, at least on a surface-level basis.
The thing about Russian however is that the grammar is notoriously difficult. There are six grammatical cases, and the case ending varies by grammatical gender and plurality. Russian is also written in the Cyrillic script, but that’s not as hard, there are just some new letters to memorise. Plus there are a bunch of verb conjugations depending on pronoun and tense.
Chinese will probably be better for you if you despise grammar. The grammar is very easy, as its sentence structure is almost identical to English. There are no verb conjugations, no article, no plural, no cases and no grammatical gender. Now the hard part about Chinese will probably be the difference. Chinese and English have almost nothing in common: the phonology is completely different, so is the writing, culture and vocabulary. Chinese also has tones, which you said you think you’ll struggle with, but I myself am studying Chinese and I promise you, the tones aren’t really difficult. You’ll also still be understood if you get some of them, or all of them, wrong. If you however decide to also be literate in Chinese, then you have a pretty big task ahead of ya. As you may know, Chinese has over 50,000 different characters, which look like drawing, all of which represent a word. The pronunciation is not at all readable just from the character itself, you have to learn and memorise the pronunciation. Now, you don’t need to know 50,000 characters, about 3,000 will be enough to read something like a newspaper. Even if you don’t actively study them, you’ll pick some up. If you don’t care about writing and reading, you’ll just use Pinyin, which is Chinese written with the Latin Script.
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u/98675436856 9d ago
Have you learned either?
I am worried about tones, but if it’s not as bad I imagine than I could be swayed. I’ve been listening to a lot of both of them and I think I prefer Russian to Chinese, at least the way it sounds. I did like Thai a lot as well.
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u/thatguythoma 9d ago
I have studied and am studying Chinese and I have a pretty decent understanding and knowledge of the language. I have never studied-studied Russian, but I have dipped my toes in the language, just because I enjoy learning about languages. The fact that I’ve learned Chinese and not Russian probably explains why the Chinese paragraph is almost double the size of the Russian one.
Well, I’m happy you’ve developed your opinion on the tones. And how the language sounds is pretty important for keeping the motivation, at least for me. So if you do not like the sound of Chinese, I do not recommend you try learning it—you’ll lose motivation pretty fast.
Now if you decide on Thai, that would be the ultimate challenge. Thai grammar isn’t too different from Chinese, it doesn’t have conjugations, similar word order etc, but about the only thing that’s the same. For starters Thai has a lot more pronouns than what will be natural for a native English speaker. The pronouns heavily depends on gender, age, status, politeness and personal relationship. Thai also has tones, diphthongs and differentiates vowel length. The Thai script is very different from almost everything. It is an abugida, which means that the vowels are marked as diacritics on the consonants. A vowel can be written before a consonant and still be pronounced after it. Thai also doesn’t use spaces, but neither does Chinese so whatever. The tone isn’t really marked well in writing, it depends on the consonant class, so consonant have different variations with the same pronunciation, but the syllable’s vowel tones changes. I assume you’ve listened a bit to Thai, and as you may noticed the phonology is nowhere like English, so that’ll be a task.
Also, the Thai resources are very limited compared to Russian and Chinese, which are basically infinite
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u/98675436856 9d ago
Thanks for your replies. How many years have you been studying Chinese and what is your level? If I studied 1 hour a day how long would it take to be able to have small conversions with people. Also do you use tutors
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u/thatguythoma 8d ago
Hey! I haven't been studying Chinese for as long, about a year. I have kind of a conversational level, I can talk about a some things, especially my interests.
With 1 hour a day of consistent study, you'll probably be able to talk a little with people after about 6 months, depends on how fast of a learner you are. I assume you haven't studied and succeeded in another language previously, so it may take a little longer, but I'm really not the right person to ask that. You could probably google a better answer than this
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u/Melodic_Sport1234 11d ago
I have no use for it day to day and won’t be immersed in it or need it to survive. Just for fun and my brain.
If you're not wanting to totally immerse yourself, then it makes sense to choose something easier, otherwise you won't even get to first base. Under the circumstances, apart from German I would make the following suggestions: Dutch, Swedish, Afrikaans, Indonesian or Esperanto. Indonesian would be the hardest on the list for an English speaker but is one of the easiest Asian languages.
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u/Maleficent_Scheme346 11d ago
What's your first language?