Japanese (I live there, I studied a lot about the country in college)
German (Literature, philosophy. I have German friends)
French (Literature, philosophy. Also, if I ever lived in Paris that would be chill)
Spanish (What is it, like 16% of Americans speak Spanish? It's become the second language of my country)
Esperanto (Wasn't William Shatner in a movie done in Esperanto? Anyway, primarily it's just because I think it's interesting)

If I added one more it would be Mandarin, but it's not really effectively on my list.

nest0r's right. I really am in this just to take over the world.

1) Japanese. A combination of educational and cultural factors makes Japanese scientists ideal to realize my plans for giant robots and bioengineered military kaijuu. Destruction of 東京 seems an unavoidable side-effect.

2) Spanish. While Japan is a natural starting point, every evil empire has an eventual need for more warm bodies. Latin America is the obvious choice, as many evil geniuses have achieved remarkable success in rising to power there. The only reason the average banana-republic despot doesn't go on to greater things appears to be a lack of matériel and/or giant monsters. My plan accounts for this deficiency.

3,4) Russian, Chinese. Ditto.

5) Esperanto. My newly-formed evil empire is in terrible need of a language. Esperanto is in terrible need of a purpose. The two are just made for each other.

Top -> Down

Portuguese,
English,
Japanese, <-- I'm right here
French,
German,
Chinese,
Russian

wildweathel Wrote:nest0r's right. I really am in this just to take over the world.

1) Japanese. A combination of educational and cultural factors makes Japanese scientists ideal to realize my plans for giant robots and bioengineered military kaijuu. Destruction of 東京 seems an unavoidable side-effect.

2) Spanish. While Japan is a natural starting point, every evil empire has an eventual need for more warm bodies. Latin America is the obvious choice, as many evil geniuses have achieved remarkable success in rising to power there. The only reason the average banana-republic despot doesn't go on to greater things appears to be a lack of matériel and/or giant monsters. My plan accounts for this deficiency.

3,4) Russian, Chinese. Ditto.

5) Esperanto. My newly-formed evil empire is in terrible need of a language. Esperanto is in terrible need of a purpose. The two are just made for each other.

Orz. (Did I do that right? Wikipedia says it can mean failure/despair or being keeled over with laughter. m(_ _)m if I got it wrong.)

However, wildweathel, I'm afraid that while you were telling us your plans, sundry heroes have taken the opportunity to prepare their defenses. The trick is to make ominous allusions to misdirect. Or perhaps that's what you were doing?? So very clever.

Japanese- The challenge, culture, and I plan on moving to Tokyo because I want to experience living in the largest metropolis on earth.

Esperanto- I like the concept and I think it will be a good third language after Japanese as it shouldn't cause much interference. I fear the L3 horror stories of losing ones L2 (which would be Japanese in my case) and hopefully learning something as extremely simple and different as Esperanto will prevent that.

Korean- The challenge. I also took Taekwondo for most of my life and we used a little Korean in class, along with having to know various bits of Korean history for ranking tests, so it would be pretty neat in that regard. Like anything the more I look into it the more interested I get.


I'd love to learn more but that is thinking too far ahead. I'd rather have a couple of really sharp knives vs many dull ones so I really want to get my Japanese to an extremely high level before moving on to something else.

After I start feeling comfortable with Japanese these are the languages I want to learn

French
Spanish
German

At that point I'll feel like I have the most prevalent languages spoken in the West. From there I would like to try for

Manderin
Arabic
Portuguese

I would then feel like I could travel anywhere in the world and be able to find someone to communicate with. If I ever did get to the point where I knew all these languages then I would probably be able to learn other languages pretty fast and could pick them up as I needed them.

1) Japanese
2) French

You guys are a tough crowd; I guess I'm easy to please. A life of access to American, Japanese, and French culture would be more than enough to let me die a happy man.

mattimus Wrote:1) Japanese
2) French

You guys are a tough crowd; I guess I'm easy to please. A life of access to American, Japanese, and French culture would be more than enough to let me die a happy man.

I'm easy to please, too. After Japanese, I'd be extremely satisfied to have Tagalog (mother is Filipino, but I never learned it).

I'm sure by the time I've accomplished my goals in Japanese/French, I'll be old and dying and unable to learn anything new. ;p

heh, I like to dream too! In order

Japanese - Because I want to
Arabic - Because I am
Korean - Because I probably was in a previous life
Chinese - Because I need to
French - Because one has to
Spanish - Because one has to
Italian - Because one has to
German - Because
Hebrew - Because I think I'll be good at it.

For the romance languages though I only really want to learn to a very casual/intermediate level. The others I'm not quite sure.

What's a polyglot?

ropsta Wrote:What's a polyglot?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=polyglot

I'd be completely happy with two

1) Japanese, so I can watch/read Code Geass
2) French, so I can read Victor Hugo

Anything else I'm not really passionate about, but of course I'd love to be able to speak any given language.

Only one person wants to learn portuguese, |:

As for me:

-Mandarin Chinese
-Japanese
-native level english
-Native level spanish
-French (had it for 3 years in junior high, forgot almost everything, though I can understand quite a bit)

meolox Wrote:

ropsta Wrote:What's a polyglot?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=polyglot

http://tiny.cc/LxE62

and also

http://tiny.cc/KPVGX

ropsta Wrote:

meolox Wrote:

ropsta Wrote:What's a polyglot?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=polyglot

http://tiny.cc/LxE62

and also

http://tiny.cc/KPVGX

Well done sir, I've been put in my place.

CarolinaCG Wrote:Only one person wants to learn portuguese, |:

Não é verdade. Eu tambem gosto de falar e ler portoguês mais melhor do que eu faço agora.

Wow, thanks Luocorn for reviving this thread
And thumbs up to all you ppl wanting to learn Dutch (if you are actually going to try and need any help.....)

It just turns out that I recently spent some time reading on the whole polyglot issue.
That is, I am now studying Japanese for 1 year and after I finished RTK last month, the usage of Anki (for KO2001) inspired me to try to learn some other languages/ 'revive' some of the languages I never really learnt well in high school.
This lead me to try to learn 4 languages at the same time: German, French, Spanish and Japanese, with the emphasis on Japanese (cause I'm hoping to go there next Octobre) and German (because it is close to my native tongue and I have a good friend who speaks fluent German). French and Spanish, I just learn 5 new words/day and maybe in 1 year I'll be somewhere It is really nice to learn some easier languages compared to Japanese

Futhermore, I'll give my thoughts on some many cited (and very cool) languages, which I also at some crazy (and very short) period considered to learn simulteanously. I myself selected these languages on most-usability in the world. You can google that and you'll find various lists for most widely spoken languages. Of course, if you know you want to travel to a certain country, the language you need to learn is that of the country. I'm talking usefullness for a world traveler.

Russian: Seems to be very limited to Russia and Ukrain. For the most part not mutual intelligible with other Slavic languages such as Czech or Servian.

Arabic: Yeah, you would think that Arabic is one language. This is however simply put not true. You have Modern Standard Arabic, which is the written language but is not spoken colloquially. On top of that you have the various dialects, which are not all mutually intelligible. Especially the dialects in the Moroccan region are very different from the ones in the Middle-East (Syria, Egypt). The Egyptian dialect seems to get you pretty far and well-educated people can also talk MSA, but you do have to learn pretty much 2 vocabularies.

Chinese: Personally, when you are not going to China, I don't know how useful it is, but that is just me (same for Japanese, but hey I'm going there). I'm planning to at one point maybe also learn some Chinese now that I know 2000 kanji, probably when I'm good enough in Japanese to not be confused. At the present it seems unhandy to learn Chinese and Japanese at the same time.

And the problem with all 3 languages is that they are very hard from my point of view, being a native Dutch (in comparison to for instance German or French).

Also I did not think any of the Indian languages (Bengali, Hindi) were worth it, considering everybody can speak English as a second language there (or at least that is what I was informed)

As I said earlier, these are just my non-educated thoughts

jondesousa Wrote:

CarolinaCG Wrote:Only one person wants to learn portuguese, |:

Não é verdade. Eu tambem gosto de falar e ler portoguês mais melhor do que eu faço agora.

Mais um aqui que gostaria de melhorar a fluência! Lembra que há mais lusófonos só no Brasil do que francófonos no mundo inteiro...
Another over here who would like to improve his fluency! Remember that there are more Portuguese speakers just in Brazil than there are French speakers in the whole world...

kame3 Wrote:Russian: Seems to be very limited to Russia and Ukrain. For the most part not mutual intelligible with other Slavic languages such as Czech or Servian.

You are underestimating the influence of Russian language in CIS & ex-USSR region. It's definitely not limited to just Ukraine and Russia. It's also the official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and some regions of other countries / unrecognized countries, more than 50% of population of the Baltic states speaks it as either native or foreign, it's also not rare to hear it spoken in other countries of Eastern Europe as for quite a while it's been taught as a primary foreign language there. Like it or not, Russian is still the primary language of communication in ex-USSR region. And knowledge of Russian is a good help with understanding of other slavic languages such as Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, etc.

By the time I'm done or die I wish to secure these:

Japanese
Mandarin Chinese
Korean
Italian
French

Spanish is my native language so I'd like to have 3 Romance languages and 3 SE Asian languages to just cover everything I'm interested in. Living in California definitely has the opportunity to use Korean/Chinese/Japanese but French and Italian will probably be more of just fun and entertainment, which isn't bad since they're far easier.

I'm tackling Korean right now and I expect that to last for about 3+ years until I move on to Mandarin.

1.Japanese
2.German (working on it now)
3. Italian
4. Spanish

I might switch order of the last two...

I want to learn Japanese, Spanish, English, and Teenage Slang in all of the above.

Out of all of them, English seems the most useful right now, and for economic reasons, I'll try to bring my English to fluency.

I'd rather pwn at 6 languages than suck at 20 during my terribly short human lifespan.

kame3 Wrote:Also I did not think any of the Indian languages (Bengali, Hindi) were worth it, considering everybody can speak English as a second language there (or at least that is what I was informed)

After visiting some family it's definitely not everyone. Just the educated, and their English isn't all that great. Surprised that people are considering learning Bengali (have noticed this in other places as well) didn't think it was that popular. Is there something specific about Bengali? I can understand Hindi but not so much Bengali.

hereticalrants Wrote:Out of all of them, English seems the most useful right now, and for economic reasons, I'll try to bring my English to fluency.

You're English seems fine from what I can judge. Unless you're talking about speaking capabilities.

As for my list it shall be:
Japanese
French
Chinese

I'm relatively sure the first two can be done and maintained but Chinese might never happen.

Actually, now that I think about it, after Tagalog I may consider French. The reason? Non-Canadians have often asked me if I spoke French, and (like most Anglophone Canadians), I don't. Is it good to want to learn a language just because it's official in my country, and is (to a point) expected of me from foreigners? Well, I can think of a few French books (Le Petit Prince, Le Comte de Monte Cristo) and movies (Le Belle et la Bete, Amelie) that I have loved, so that could be a good start.