third language

[Portia]

I want to learn a third language, but can't decide which one I should pursue. I doubt I will devote enough time to get to more than an intermediate conversational level, but I pick up languages fairly easily.

Here are the main contenders. Any experience or opinions?

German: I already had a tutor two years ago for German who's still around. This is a useful language in business and philosophy, and I enjoyed the cognates with English and the challenges of the grammar. The sound system wasn't too rough for me.

Italian: This would be the easiest for me to pick up, both for its grammatical closeness to French and Latin, and its sounds. Italy is also probably the top of my list for travel and cuisine.

Norwegian: There is a memoir series I would love to read in the original. This was also by far my mom's favorite country to visit, so much so she named my brother a Norwegian name. I know little about the language, but took a CE course last fall about their culture.

Arabic: My brother suggested off the cuff that we should do this in the fall at his school. (I'd audit it, I guess. Cost isn't really a problem.) Although the culture intrigues me (you should have seen my grandma's face when he suggested she do it, too--it'd be free!), it's the only non-IE language on the list, and I quite frankly don't have the best perseverance.

[Katya]

My thoughts:

I took two years of German at BYU and while I enjoyed it, I was also struggling quite a bit by the end. Having to memorize three different genders was especially tough, since they're not at all regular. (In that regard, I honestly found Russian much easier, despite its two additional cases, multiple declensions, and dual-aspect system of verbs.) I also wouldn't count on the cognates being as helpful as you'd think; they're certainly helpful for basic words, but once you get into more complex vocabulary, they're much less helpful, because so much of our complex vocabulary in English is Romance-based. All that said, I do really like German and I'd like to brush up on it again, but it's by far the most challenging IE language I've studied.

I haven't studied Italian, but I have been slowly working on some Spanish, so I imagine the challenges would be similar. Personally, I wouldn't like doing two languages from the same subfamily back to back because of the possibility of confusion, but you'd certainly be able to leverage your other Romance languages in terms of comprehension. (Also, given your love of culture and travel, Italian seems like a no-brainer.)

I don't know much about Norwegian. I tried to learn some Swedish, at some point, and all I really remember is that the grammar was much simpler than German, but after poking around Wikipedia, it looks like Norwegian may be more complicated than Swedish. (Also, there's the whole "Nynorsk/Bokmmål" thing to contend with.)

Arabic is one of the few languages that truly intimidates me. (Cantonese is also up there.) Also, learning Arabic doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope, since you'd be learning Classical Arabic, and most people speak and write their own dialect, instead. Non-IE languages are cool, though, and the writing system is beautiful (and beautifully complex).

[Portia]

My thoughts:

I took two years of German at BYU and while I enjoyed it, I was also struggling quite a bit by the end. Having to memorize three different genders was especially tough, since they're not at all regular. (In that regard, I honestly found Russian much easier, despite its two additional cases, multiple declensions, and dual-aspect system of verbs.) I also wouldn't count on the cognates being as helpful as you'd think; they're certainly helpful for basic words, but once you get into more complex vocabulary, they're much less helpful, because so much of our complex vocabulary in English is Romance-based. All that said, I do really like German and I'd like to brush up on it again, but it's by far the most challenging IE language I've studied.

I haven't studied Italian, but I have been slowly working on some Spanish, so I imagine the challenges would be similar. Personally, I wouldn't like doing two languages from the same subfamily back to back because of the possibility of confusion, but you'd certainly be able to leverage your other Romance languages in terms of comprehension. (Also, given your love of culture and travel, Italian seems like a no-brainer.)

I don't know much about Norwegian. I tried to learn some Swedish, at some point, and all I really remember is that the grammar was much simpler than German, but after poking around Wikipedia, it looks like Norwegian may be more complicated than Swedish. (Also, there's the whole "Nynorsk/Bokmmål" thing to contend with.)

Arabic is one of the few languages that truly intimidates me. (Cantonese is also up there.) Also, learning Arabic doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope, since you'd be learning Classical Arabic, and most people speak and write their own dialect, instead. Non-IE languages are cool, though, and the writing system is beautiful (and beautifully complex).

Really helpful, thanks! Leaning towards Italian -- hope there are modern Italian versions of Boccaccio and Dante to check out. ^_^ Although I did notice that Middle French was semi-understandable in a way Middle English just isn't, unless you're Tolkien. (Of course, I think the Italian dialect imbroglio was crazier even than French ... and still might be, for all I know!)

[Portia]

Oh, and to prove that I'm not just obssessed with long-dead male authors, Elena Ferrante is one of the best currently working authors, no doubt in my mind.

[Digit]

Nihongo o sukoshi hanasemasu, demo kakemasen. I can speak a little Japanese, but not write.