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Got a Question About Language Learning?

It might be one of these…

Claire Handscombe
6 min readJul 1, 2021
Image by Emily Morter on Unsplash

Which language should I learn?

Ask yourself why you want to learn. Are you drawn to the literature of a particular place? Is there somewhere you can go on holiday, where you can put into practice what you have learned? Are you simply wanting to give it a go to see if you can — in which case a less complex language might be a good place to start — or are you wanting to challenge yourself by learning something renowned to be difficult?

Or maybe you’re learning for professional reasons. If your company does a lot of business with one particular place, the language of that country seems to be a logical place to start. Otherwise, Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish are all among the most spoken, and most likely to be influential in the global economy in the years to come.

What is the hardest language to learn?

That is a subjective question — as a general rule, we find languages that are closest to our own to be easiest to learn. (Which may be one reason why Brits find it harder than other nationalities to learn a language — English is a mushy mess with many different sources, with no cousin as close as, for example, Swedish is to Norwegian.)

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Claire Handscombe
Claire Handscombe

Written by Claire Handscombe

Editor of WALK WITH US: How the West Wing Changed Our Lives; author of the novel UNSCRIPTED and of CONQUERING BABEL: a Practical Guide to Learning a Language.

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