this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Learning a new language. You learn a bit about how languages work, understand other cultures a bit better, usually learn new vocabulary for your native language, understand the relationship between different languages, learn the roots of loan words and generally helps your brain stay healthy, even by only studying the basics.
what lauguage would you recommend for people who only know english?
Not OP, but I've asked myself this as well. I think it depends on where you live and what you want out of your language learning experience. If your goal is to learn something more useful in everyday life and you live in the southern US, Spanish is a great option. If you're from Canada, French is probably the most useful. German and Mandarin are useful in the business world, but the latter is significantly harder to learn. If you're not worried about maximizing the utility of what you learn, Norwegian is considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers, and let's be real, Norway is awesome.
It's more important that you stick with whatever you choose though. That's the part I've struggled with.
To be honest I'm not a native English speaker so your advice is probably more useful anyway. My husband is British and has studied plenty of languages, finding Swedish and Norwegian definitely the easiest to pick up. Romance languages have more complicated grammar but you'll find a lot more TV and movies to watch to casually pick up a bit more of the language, which I find useful because I only speak English as well as I do from watching a lot of TV (first with subs) when I was younger.
do you have any swedish tv shows or movies you could recommend? the more the merrier please, or any resources for it at all?
Some from recent memory:
I think those might be easy enough to find online depending on where you look.
Esperanto is reckoned an easy pickup, has speakers globally, and will improve your default in most romance languages. The community is also quite nice, in my experience.
Esperanto seems to be pretty useless to invest so much time into learning it. Wouldn't be learning "normal" language more beneficial anyway?
Depends on your goals. If you're going somewhere with one language to spend time, or especially value a particular language, studying that language makes sense. If you want access to a global network of the sort of people who would pick up a conlang intended to be a universal second language, one speakers of can be found anywhere, Esperanto's your pick.
Mi lernis Esperanton ĉar mi volas havi amikojn en ĉiaj la landoj de la mondo.
I am Polish native that can easily read Ukrainian, English and also some German and I have no clue what that sentence means in Esperanto :D. I can only guess that "lernis" is probably something like "learning" and "mondo" refers to "world" (guess based purely on 'Le Monde' - French newspaper). Rest looks like some random Lithuanian stuff. I don't think knowledge of Esperanto could give me any advantage when traveling across Europe. Idea is cool but to be honest English is the new lingua franca and I think that's good because it's easy to pick up and already widespread.
You weren't the target audience for my initial comment.
"I learned Esperanto because I want to have friends in all the countries of the world."