Which Language Should You Learn? Ask a Better Question

The question people ask is which language is most useful. It sounds practical and it is nearly useless, because usefulness is not a property of a language. It is a property of a life.

Mandarin is the most useful language in the world to someone whose company is opening an office in Shenzhen and an ornament to someone who will never go. Welsh is worth more than either to a person moving to Bangor. The list you are looking for does not exist, because it would have to be a list of one.

The two published sources that are worth reading

The first is about cost. The US Foreign Service Institute trains diplomats full time and publishes how long its languages take. Its categories run from roughly 600 class hours for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, through about 900 for German and around 1,000 for Russian, Greek or Hindi, to approximately 2,200 for Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean.

Those numbers describe selected adults in intensive full-time classes, so nobody should read them as a personal timetable. Read them as a ratio: Japanese will cost you something like three to four times what Portuguese costs, for the same level. That is a real fact about your evenings.

The second is about demand. The British Council''s Languages for the Future scored languages against the UK''s economic, diplomatic, cultural and educational needs and put Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic and German at the top. It is a national policy document, not personal advice — but if your reason for learning is professional and unattached to a particular country, it is the least arbitrary list available.

The question that actually predicts success

Not which language is useful but where will this language touch my actual week?

Contact is the variable that decides whether a language survives its first winter. Not motivation, which is a feeling and behaves like one. Contact: a colleague, a parent-in-law, a country you return to, a literature you already read in translation, a client, a village, a person you want to speak to properly before it is too late.

Set the two facts against each other and the choice usually makes itself. Italian at 600 hours with a house near Lucca is a good decision. Japanese at 2,200 hours with a genuine ten-year interest is a good decision. Japanese at 2,200 hours because a website called it valuable is how people end up believing they are bad at languages.

Four situations, four sensible answers

You want a first success. Take a Category I language — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese. Reaching a level where you can hold a conversation quickly is not a consolation prize; it is what makes the second language possible.

You want career leverage in the UK. Follow the British Council list, then narrow it by your own sector. The scarce combination is usually language plus industry, not language alone.

You want a country. Learn its language, whatever the hours say. Contact wins.

You want to test whether you can. Choose the language that gives you the most speaking opportunities in the town you live in, and judge yourself on months, not weeks.

One last test

Before committing, spend a fortnight with the candidate. Not an app streak: two weeks of listening to it, reading a page a day, learning fifty words and saying them out loud to somebody. You are testing whether the sound of the language pleases you, because you are about to hear it for several hundred hours.

If it does, the hour figures stop mattering very much. If it does not, no ranking in the world will carry you to March.