French or Tagalog:
Choosing a Language

This is not merely one of those abstract questions universities and fitness centres like to annoy you with before they accept your application.

Are you planning to marry a German and live in Germany? Then the language you want to learn in German. You should stick to German and learn it well. Do you own a hardware store in a neighbourhood of a growing American city where your customers represent eighteen different language groups, including Tagalog and Punjabi? Then you want to learn greetings, key business expressions like "invoice" and "charge account," and the names of as many items in your inventory as you can in eighteen different languages, including Tagalog and Punjabi.

The way you're going to spend your language learning hours depends on your objectives.

We're going to presume here that whatever language you choose to learn, you want to learn well. If you merely want to learn a smattering of greetings and phrases in a lot of languages, great. You're in for a lot of fun, particularly when you see, if you haven't already, how far even a few words can carry you. In that case, the departure from the method outlined here is obvious. You don't need mastery of the grammar. Most big bookstores offer racks of phrase books for travellers in up to twenty-five different languages. Buy all you want and study your favourite ten or fifteen of the first hundred phrases in each.

Don't feel frivolous if you feel you want to learn a language but don't know which one. You're part of a movement to correct a weakness that has bedevilled America since the founding of our nation. Do you like opera? Try Italian. Diamonds? Try Dutch. Commercial advantage? German or Japanese. Cutting edge positioning for the world down the road? Chinese or Arabic. East-West barrier breaking and door opening? Russian.

French is second only to English as an international language, spoken far beyond the borders of France itself. Spanish enables Americans to become more complete
 

citizens of the Western Hemisphere, while a resurgent Spain itself becomes an increasingly important part of Europe.

If willingness of subject peoples to learn the language of the conqueror is any indication of the conqueror's popularity, then the winning conqueror is England and the loser is Russia. Those forced into Moscow's postwar empire had an aversion to learning Russian, but in spite of Communism's failure, the Russian language remains the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It can be your key to the dozen or so related languages (Polish, Czech, etc.).

Maybe you want to learn a difficult language, like Finnish; an easy language, like Indonesian; a useful language, like French; or an obscure language, like Albanian.

My motives for learning various languages have ranged from chance and youthful energy (Norwegian) to wanting a vital tool for my work (Spanish) to processing refugees (Hungarian) to getting dates with women whose looks I liked (Swedish) to proving I wasn't an idiot for almost flunking Latin (Chinese).

Nobody who sells language learning books and devices will ever frown in disappointment at your choice of a language. Don't feel you have to apologise or explain that you want to learn Czech — or Catalan or Yoruba or Urdu or Kurdish — for no other reason than you're tired of walking around a world as exciting as this one speaking only one language!