Most people have a bunch of free time at the moment and are looking for productive ways to fill it. One of the most obvious things you can do during this lockdown is learning a new language. It’s all very well telling yourself that you want to learn a language but it can often be very difficult to decide which of the world’s many, many languages you should try and learn. So today I am going to give a guide to how I would go about choosing a new language to learn. This will probably be more useful for people whose first language is English, as people from the UK, the US, and Australia are the bulk of my audience (readers, I’m not sure which is the right term), but the ideas that underpin this are applicable to everyone.

Why are you learning a language?

This question is probably the most important thing to think about when you are choosing a language to learn. I personally choose languages because the culture that they come from interests me, and I see learning these languages as a gateway to better understanding these cultures. That’s why I like to learn smaller languages like Welsh and Catalan, but obviously not everyone wants to learn languages purely out of interest. Minority languages especially are not hugely attractive to people who want to get something more obvious out of learning a language, which is a completely fine reason to want to learn a language. If you are looking to do the exact opposite of me and learn a language to improve your CV (resumé for you Americans) then major world languages, or the languages of countries that your country does business with are probably your best bet. These will probably be all the ones that you got taught in school or had an option to learn in school, but probably vary depending on your country. Here French, German, and Spanish are the best options, but Mandarin and Russian are also good. In America they are Spanish, French, Japanese, and Mandarin, and in Australia Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Obviously business is not the only reason to learn a language. You might have relatives who come from a different culture, and learning their language could bring you closer to them. I know a lot of people who are in this position but haven’t had time to learn their grandparent’s (or whatever relation it is) language. You might have a book or film or song in another language that you really love and want to be able to understand the original.

I have no specific reason, I just want to learn a language

Which language will be easiest?

This is where it can get a bit more complected. If you don’t already have a reason for learning a specific language then it can be difficult to work out which one to learn. The first thing that a lot of first-time language learners think about when choosing a language is how difficult it is. There are an awful lot of articles attempting to answer the question of ‘what is the easiest language to learn?’ but that is a bit of a disingenuous question. There is no one easiest language in the world for everyone to learn because we are all coming at it from a different starting point. Whilst a French speaker could find Catalan or Spanish the easiest languages to pick up because of their shared vocabulary and grammar, a native Japanese speaker could have a much easier time with Korean.

The best way to work out which languages will be easiest for you is to look at which language family your language belongs to. English is a member of the Germanic family, more specifically the West Germanic branch of that family. The closest languages to English should be the easiest for an English speaker to learn, so in English’s case these are Scots and Frisian. Perhaps you want to learn a language that is a bit more widely spoken that those two. Dutch is the closest major language to English. The mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) are also relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, thanks to the influence of Old Norse on the English language. One of the mainland Scandinavian languages can also be an interesting option to go for, as by learning one you can understand the other two pretty well (Norwegian is the best to go for in this regard). I am excluding German from this section because its grammar is significantly more difficult than the languages I have mentioned. Equally Yiddish can be more difficult for an English speaker to learn, as it makes use of the Hebrew alphabet.

Despite not being Germanic, French can also be relatively easy for an English speaker to learn. Thanks to the Norman Invasion in 1066, continued contact with French since then, and the use of Latin in science and by the church, English shares over half of its vocabulary with French. Obviously if you find learning grammar more difficult that learning vocabulary then this may not be extremely useful to you, but if you want a headstart with learning vocabulary then French might be for you. Another advantage with French is that it is so widely spoken, so high-quality cheap/free resources are extremely easy to find and you are definitely going to get an opportunity to speak it. France, Belgium, Swizerland, Quebec, Haiti, a lot of African countries, and various other ex-French colonies. If you are practically-minded then French could be useful, as several studies have predicted that it will overtake Spanish and Mandarin to become the world’s most widely-spoken language by 2050.

How widely available are resources?

Speaking about French brings me onto this next consideration. It’s all very well a language being easy for you to learn, but that won’t amount to much if you cannot find resources to learn with or speakers to practice with other speakers then it will be much more difficult to learn. French and other major world languages have loads of cheap and free resources thanks to their popularity. Most language-learning websites have fairly fleshed-out courses in French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Italian. Mandarin and Japanese also have loads of resources thanks to their growing popularity in recent years. Most bookshops will have textbooks for all of these languages (although they can be wildly expensive, with a lot of them costing around forty pounds) as well as others that will depend on your area.

There are a few considerations to take into place when working out which languages will have the most resources for in your area. If you have a university in your town or city they will probably teach at least some languages. Midway through the academic year I found that the university bookshop had a bunch of textbooks that would usually cost forty pounds for a few pounds each because they were not the most up to date edition. Whilst the edition of the textbook matters if you are taking a class, for self study it doesn’t particularly matter. Likewise at the end of the academic year there will usually be a bunch of textbooks in charity shops for all the courses that have finished, which might be languages you are interested in depending on the university you live near.

You should also take into account the languages that are spoken in your area. Where I live we are close enough to Wales that most bookshops and libraries will have a few Welsh textbooks. This tends to be more useful for finding books and films in your target language than resources meant for teaching your target langage. Around here the libraries have a few books in Urdu and Somali (among others) because they are spoken by immigrant communities in the area.

Try out different options

If you still have no idea which language you want to focus on then you can do what I did a few years back: just try out all of the different options. Duolingo has all sorts of different languages available for free, and even if the course isn’t amazing it can give you an idea of what the language is like. I would recommend doing the first five or so lessons of a bunch of different courses to see which ones you like. You never know which language you end up loving.

Some recommendations

Esperanto

If you have never learned a foreign language before and don’t have a specific goal then Esperanto is a great first language to learn. Esperanto is a constructed language created by Polish linguist and ophthalmologist Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof in 1887 designed to be a universal language. It was relatively popular before the 1930s, particularly with Anarchists, but various authoritarian regimes viewed Esperantists with suspicion. Esperantists were one of the groups targeted during the Holocaust and Stalin’s Purges. The internet gave Esperanto a second life, and now it is spoken by anywhere between a tens of thousands and two million people.

Esperanto is a great first language if you want to go on to other European languages. It is completely phonetic, so it is very easy to pronounce correctly. The grammar is also pretty simple. You use suffixes to indicate whether a noun is singular or plural, subject or object. All singular subject nouns end in -o, all plural subject nouns in -oj, and you just add an -n to the end to make the noun an object. Verbs and adjectives are equally regular. There are a bunch of translations of books and websites into Esperanto and the community around it are really dedicated so you are bound to find somebody to practice with.

Duolingo has an Esperanto course, and you can also find a lot of learning resources for Esperanto on lernu!. Lernu! is available in over 20 languages, and has forums, news, and a library of books and other media in Esperanto.

Swedish

I won’t lie there is a fair degree of personal bias in this recommendation, but I do think Swedish is a good first language to learn. It shares a lot of vocabulary with English, doesn’t have really difficult aspects of grammar like grammatical cases and conjugation for person. It does have some things that might be hard. Plurals take a while to get used to. Pronunciation, in particular stress, is something that I still have problems with. Despite those issues I still think that Swedish is one of the easier languages for an English speaker to learn. Danish pronunciation is far harder to get used to (and far less nice to listen to, sorry Danes) and Norwegian has a lot of variation that can be an issue.

Swedish is available as a course on Duolingo, but the Swedish government also offer a completely free online Swedish course. I only did the first little bit but it seems good. For practising your Swedish you can get a lot of STV’s programming via the website stvplay.se (some stuff is unavailable outside Sweden, but a lot of it is). Likewise, Sveriges Radio is completely accessible outside Sweden, and a lot of their shows are available as podcasts wherever good podcasts are available. Radio Sweden på Lätt Svenska (Radio Sweden in Easy Swedish) is particularly useful if you want a quick roundup of news in Sweden in Swedish that you should be able to understand most of at A2/B1 level.

Welsh

Again I have a bit of a personal bias but I think Welsh is quite a nice language to start with and has an undeserved reputation for being difficult. At first glance Welsh may seem incomprehensible, but once you have learnt the alphabet the spelling makes complete sense. As Welsh is a Celtic language its grammar and vocabulary are further from English than my other suggestions, but if you want to try something different then Welsh might be for you. Things like its verb-subject-object word order, the lack of the verb ‘to have’, and mutations are features that seem strange for English speakers and take some getting used to, but they are no more difficult to learn than French verb conjugation or Swedish word order.

As with all of these suggestions Welsh is available on Duolingo, but the Welsh Government also offer free learning resources at learnwelsh.cymru. For Welsh TV you can find various original and dubbed programmes on S4C. In the UK you can access the channel through the BBC Iplayer, but their programmes are also available at s4c.cymru.

Obviously those are only a few of the possible languages you could try to learn during this lockdown. There are around seven thousand languages in the world (more if you include dialects that are practically languages) and all of them offer something if you choose to pursue them, these suggestions are just some languages that I think would be good for a first-time learner.

I hope that you enjoyed this and it helps. If you did enjoy it then please consider sharing it wherever you fancy and following my socials. In the coming weeks I have a bunch of stuff that I am working on at the moment. I also have a Patreon now too, so if you are really into what I write then feel three to chuck me a pound or two.