^ Topic says it all, what language are you going to learn after Japanese/Whatever language you are learning right now?

After 2-3 years of enjoying Japanese, I'm probably going to tackle Korean, always sounded like a neat language to me, just like Japanese + Awesome bragging rights.

Chinese, cause I'm hooked on Kanji. Can't imagine ever learning another language without characters.

I just heard the amateur symphony orchestra I'm playing in will go to Shanghai Christmas 2009, so it's Chinese for me... hope to get some use out of learning kanji.

I'm tempted to go for Arabic or Hebrew; a years in the Middle East sounds like fun. Mandarin may be more useful for business, but I'm having enough kanji fun with Japanese. I'll wait 'til I get bored of that before I consider Mandarin.

Chinese is seeming like a popular answer. I'm torn between a lot of different languages, but I have a feeling it'll be Chinese due to opportunity to use and ease of media availability.

A European language. I can't decide between French or German.

I'm a heck of a long way away from "finishing" Japanese, so I won't be learning anything else anytime soon, but I'd be interested to see how fast I'd progress in French or German. I've studied both a little before, at school, and obviously they've got the similar alphabet. I'd get cracking straightaway with AFoGATT and SRS, and I'd be pretty optimistic that I'd go quite speedily.

At the moment I intend to learn Korean, but the span of time between now and then is large enough, and the number of languages I'm interested in broad enough, that my choice may change by the time I'm actually setting off to learn something new. Chinese, Spanish, and Russian are up there.

I've allready started to learn Korean, though I rarely actually study it, just repeat some sentences I have in Anki from time to time, focusing mostly on Japanese atm.

I'm thinking about learning some Chinese afterwards.

However, I'm not sure which language I want to learn.

I wonder whether Cantonese or Mandarin will be more of interest/use to me.

Japanese is the only language that sounds cool to me. I've never been interested in European languages.. I guess Chinese would be a great challenge but I can't see myself wanting to become fluent in it, like I want with Japanese. The other that could be a possibility would be Korean. I like their movies :p

Dutch, and then Korean. I've already learned hangul for later use.

And after that... maybe French. That or Danish/Norwegian, just to increase my number of known languages without any significant effort.

Ah, probably German. But that's a long way off.

alyks Wrote:Ah, probably German. But that's a long way off.

German's actually a fun language to learn, if you like phonetic languages. It's got the verb-on-the-end style of Japanese and the tons-of-exceptions-in-grammar of English (but not as severe as English, I think).

I will go for Mandarin, because it's the lowest hanging fruit after Japanese. But maybe I won't start in earnest until after JLPT1, so I can avoid vocabulary-mix-up issues.

I've always wanted to learn Italian, though... ...one of these days...

hknamida Wrote:And after that... maybe French. That or Danish/Norwegian, just to increase my number of known languages without any significant effort.

I found French to be a nightmare at first - couldn't spell anything right for the first year, because half the time, you don't pronounce the last syllable! After a couple years, I grew to really liking the sound of it, though.

Also, for some reason, I find French to be amazingly lucid. IMHO, it really should have been the international language of choice. (no flame wars, please!)

I think I'll probably go for korean, just because I think the writing system is awesome. I'm not sure if I really want to go all the way with it though, or maybe just get my feet wet. I guess I'll make that decision when the time comes.

Other than that, I think I'll learn spanish, simply because it's considered "easy" and I want to see just how fast I can achieve fluency in it.

kfmfe04 Wrote:I will go for Mandarin, because it's the lowest hanging fruit after Japanese.

No, that would no doubt be Korean since Korean grammar is so similar to Japanese (Mandarin Chinese is completely different).

I haven't quite decided what my next language will be, not that my Japanese is anywhere near good enough to start another one yet.

I'm thinking I might refresh my 6 years of French classes and learn to speak the language fluently. I expect I'd be able to pick it back up fairly quickly, so that's a plus. On the other hand, I've lately been interested in learning Korean since it's a neat-sounding language (and the grammar is somewhat similar to Japanese). Or it might be Mandarin Chinese since kanji are fun, I know a lot of Chinese people, and it's probably a good choice economically speaking as well.

I'll probably figure it out when I get more confident with my Japanese.

Tobberoth Wrote:

kfmfe04 Wrote:I will go for Mandarin, because it's the lowest hanging fruit after Japanese.

No, that would no doubt be Korean since Korean grammar is so similar to Japanese (Mandarin Chinese is completely different).

You are right in general, but wrong for me - I already know Mandarin at about a first or second grade level so Mandarin will be faster for me, without a doubt... ...to me, Mandarin almost has no grammar (at least relative to complex grammars like Japanese or French or German).

I don't know maybe Thai or Cantonese
As for european languages french and german

Modern Standard Arabic has top priority. Took it as a minor last year, but didn't pick up that much. I'm eager to try the 10.000 sentence method.

After that, or simultaneously, I'd like to actually become fluent in German, right now I can only understand reading it.

I'd like to try the 10.000 sentence method on both Classical Greek and Sanskrit; which I both 'know', but with both I feel I should know them better than I do.

Tagalog seems interesting too; Irish and Mandarin too.

Ah it's never gonna end. I'd like to learn Russian too! And Finnish, and Lithuanian. I'm also fairly interested in Korean.

And I'd really like to learn Okinawan. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that one yet

Probably math, for me.

i think i'm going to go for french, mostly because i studied it for six years already and i feel like it will be easier to pick back up once i set up an immersion environment. plus, after so much work for japanese, i think it would be nice to have an easier target for a little while. after that i'd like to learn arabic, russian or chinese.

phoenix Wrote:.

And I'd really like to learn Okinawan. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that one yet

Well, about 90-95% of what they speak in Okinawa is standard japanese, unless you talk to people in their 60's and up, or go to some of the remote islands (even there its still mostly the older generations that speak non standard japanese).

kfmfe04 Wrote:

alyks Wrote:Ah, probably German. But that's a long way off.

German's actually a fun language to learn, if you like phonetic languages. It's got the verb-on-the-end style of Japanese and the tons-of-exceptions-in-grammar of English (but not as severe as English, I think).

Hm, not really .. unless I've already forgotten how to speak my own language (German here). English and German sentence structure is pretty similar.
What makes German hard at times is the grammar I guess.
Just one example: In English you only use "the" - for everything.
In some other European language you have to decide if it's "a female or male word" (e.g. Spanish: el/la). In German you have to decide if a word is neutral (das), female (die) or male (der). It doesn't make any sense at all and there are no rules, you just have to study it.
I just explained this to a Japanese coworker yesterday. The sun is male in Spanish (el sol), but female in German (die Sonne). It doesn't make any sense, that's just how it is.
I guess with a lot of input (reading / listening) you will get a feeling for that quickly though.

There are a lot of similar words in English and German which makes it easy, though (e.g. hand, arm - just the pronunciation is slightly different).


As for me I had to study French (basic level), Spanish (conversational level), Latin (high level) and English (hopefully somewhat proficient) at school.
English is the only language I didn't lose until now, because I use it everyday.
I'm only interested in Japanese (basically it's been like that for the past 10 years), so I want to concentrate on this language only. I'll have my hands full with that the next XY years and I'm pretty sure I don't want to study another language after that.
It would have to be a language I use (almost) everyday anyway in order to not lose it right away again (-__-)

I want an 'easy' language, for an English speaker. I feel with AJATT, a European language would be easily consumed in a year or two. Perhaps French or German, something with an alphabet.

Swedish is like German. We don't have male or female words (well we do, but it's very rare and they aren't considered masculine or feminine in modern swedish) but we do have neutrum and reale. As you can imagine, it's the same as masculine or feminine, but it's impossible to hear which is which (unlike spanish etc where they usually end in different sounds) and there's no logic what so ever behind it. It makes a HUGE difference on how words are used though, so you simply have to learn from experience which word is which.