Want To Learn A New Language...what should I go with?

[Troll_Whisperer]

morenoingrato said:

Troll_Whisperer said:
Simply choose either the most useful one (Spanish or Mandarin) or the one that attracts you the most (perhaps Japanese from a gamer's standpoint).

I'm Spanish, was a Spanish teacher and I'm living in Japan. So my opinion on Spanish and Japanese.

Spanish is easy in many areas. Pronunciation and spelling are beyond simple so it literally takes one afternoon to learn to read and pronounce Spanish fluently. Of course you still won't know what you're reading/saying but this helps A LOT. Grammar is logical, but you'll have to learn many different conjugations for verbs, which sucks for English natives. Still, one of the easier languages out there and very useful.

Japanese. The opposite of Spanish when it comes to writing/reading. Nightmare. You may be 99% fluent in conversation before you are able to read a newspaper properly. The pronunciation is very easy, just like Spanish. The grammar is very simple, but very different to English, so some people struggle. For me it's very easy, but I speak Basque which is (surprisingly) pretty similar grammatically so that may have helped. But, overall, I'd say it's not too hard, very simplified language with few different times (present, past, etc.) and no conjugations.

To be fair, average spanish speakers probably use 10% of all the existing conjugations.

In Spain we use most of them regularly, I'd say.