Language gets you in. This is where it takes you — the places, the people and the conversations that only open once you can hold your side of them.
Mandarin has a reputation built on the wrong difficulty. Its grammar dispenses with several things that make French learners work hard: verb conjugations, grammatical gender and agreement. The real obstacles are elsewhere, and knowing exactly where they are is what makes the first year survivable.
Britain has spent a decade quoting one figure about its own language deficit, and rather fewer about what a language does for the person who has one. Both are worth looking at honestly.
Most podcast lists for French learners are lists of podcasts in French. That is not the same thing. What matters is how fast the speaking is, whether anyone is making allowances for you, and whether the show still exists.
Every list of the best languages to learn is really a list of somebody else's priorities. Two published sources are genuinely useful, and neither of them can tell you what to do with a Tuesday evening.
German has a reputation for being difficult and a habit of being long. It is also a close relative of the language you already speak — and once you can see the family resemblance, a great deal of it stops behaving like a foreign language.
The memory advice that circulates online is mostly a mixture of one nineteenth-century experiment, one Renaissance technique and a great deal of invention. A smaller set of findings has been replicated for decades — and they are less comfortable than the tricks.