Foreign language suggestions?

I’m thinking of learning a foreign language, for the fun of it. I havent made up my mind which language to pick, so I’m looking for suggestions. Possibly something that is not too extremely difficult to learn.

This is going to end up in IMHO real soon.

Anyway, I’d of course suggest Esperanto. It was designed to be easy, so you won’t have to spend much time on it. The World Congress of Esperanto next year will be in Beijing, the International Youth Congress in Moscow, so if you start now you’ll be in a good position to get a pretty cheap trip to China and/or Russia. See Lernu.net for a rather nice series of online courses.

If you want to study a national language, Italian or Spanish are probably the easiest I can think of, or you could try one of the Scandinavian languages.

UnuMondo

There was a very similar thread in IMHO a while ago and I’ll repeat what I said there.

Languages don’t exist in a vaccum. They are the product and main vectors of specific cultures. The first question you should ask yourself is: what are the cultures I’m most interested in?

Secondly, you need to have slightly clearer objectives. How do you want to use your newly acquired skills? Do you want to chat with your Mexican neighbors in Spanish? Do you want to decipher Buddhist Pali suttas? Do you want to impress your friends and swoon the ladies with Klingon poetry?

If you only speak English and are not interested in spending massive amounts of time studying, then, for sure, European languages are by far the easiest. When people say that Japanese, Mandarin or Arabic are hard, they mean that it will take you years of intensive study before you can reach a satisfactory level of fluency.

Here’s the link to the IMHO thread on this same topic that you may find useful.

.:Nichol:.

Imo, you should learn the language of whatever country you have the most interest in (since it’s “for the fun of it”, I assume there’s no career plan involved), or else you won’t find learning it to be fun at all (learning a foreign language implies a lot of work) and a language you have a reasonnable chance to have a chance of actually practising (or else, it will be a pointless exercise).
All things being equal, if I were an american (I assume you are), I’d learn spanish, (which is reasonnably easy to learn, at least for someone whose first language is an european one) since you’ll easily find a lot of speakers in the US, and can travel relatively easily to spanish-speaking countries.