I’d ask what it is with commies all obsessing over particular languages, but, like, at least this makes more sense than the washed up old pro Soviet “Cold Warriors” who get mad when other Western commies don’t speak Russian, so.
I’m not really obsessing over anything. I’ve got a casual interest in linguistics as a field and I want to study languages as a long-term hobby. I chose Chinese for my first secondary language for a couple reasons.
Understanding Chinese opens up a lot of stuff that isn’t available to me in English. If I want to read Spanish-language news, or great Spanish-language works of literature, most likely I can find those professionally translated into English. But there’s a lot of stuff in Chinese that simply no one is interested in translating.
I would like to visit China, and I would feel awkward going to someone else’s country and not being able to communicate with them for at least basic tasks in their own language. I don’t have to be an expert, but if I need to know where the bathroom is I don’t want to have to pester people until one of them goes and gets their uncle who speaks English.
Chinese is known for being a particularly difficult language for English-speakers to learn. I figure that if I can learn it, then I can learn any language, which is a big confidence/motivation boost for my language-learning efforts moving forward.
Once I know enough Chinese to have proper conversations in it, I intend to start working on learning Spanish. Spanish specifically because it’s the most practical secondary language for me to have. 9 times out of 10 when I’m going, “Damn, I wish we had somebody to hand who spoke [language]” that language was Spanish. (The other 1/10 is split halfway between Chinese and Korean)
After Spanish, I’ve got a long list of “tertiary interest” sort of languages I’d like to tackle someday, and those languages are from all over the globe.
I’d ask what it is with commies all obsessing over particular languages, but, like, at least this makes more sense than the washed up old pro Soviet “Cold Warriors” who get mad when other Western commies don’t speak Russian, so.
I’m not really obsessing over anything. I’ve got a casual interest in linguistics as a field and I want to study languages as a long-term hobby. I chose Chinese for my first secondary language for a couple reasons.
Understanding Chinese opens up a lot of stuff that isn’t available to me in English. If I want to read Spanish-language news, or great Spanish-language works of literature, most likely I can find those professionally translated into English. But there’s a lot of stuff in Chinese that simply no one is interested in translating.
I would like to visit China, and I would feel awkward going to someone else’s country and not being able to communicate with them for at least basic tasks in their own language. I don’t have to be an expert, but if I need to know where the bathroom is I don’t want to have to pester people until one of them goes and gets their uncle who speaks English.
Chinese is known for being a particularly difficult language for English-speakers to learn. I figure that if I can learn it, then I can learn any language, which is a big confidence/motivation boost for my language-learning efforts moving forward.
Once I know enough Chinese to have proper conversations in it, I intend to start working on learning Spanish. Spanish specifically because it’s the most practical secondary language for me to have. 9 times out of 10 when I’m going, “Damn, I wish we had somebody to hand who spoke [language]” that language was Spanish. (The other 1/10 is split halfway between Chinese and Korean)
After Spanish, I’ve got a long list of “tertiary interest” sort of languages I’d like to tackle someday, and those languages are from all over the globe.