Which language should I learn? (Excl. German/Spanish)?
I'm wondering what language I should focus on learning. I'm open to most languages that aren't too terribly complicated.
Ones I won't learn are German and Spanish, or Arabic. German because I'm already taking classes for it, Spanish because I don't want to learn a language everyone else is, that's no fun, and Arabic because the writing system will make my head explode.
I'm just wondering what language everyone thinks I should learn. Languages I've dabbled in are:
Finnish (very lightly)
Russian (somewhat more)
Swedish (some)
Norwegian (little, about as much as Russian)
Danish (hardly at all)
Icelandic (little)
French (some)
Korean (barely)
Japanese (little)
I'm sure there are other languages I shortly dabbled in because I was bored and curious.
Now, how I would like this formatted (if you'd like to, it'd make me happy, but you are the answerer 
)
Language
Why?
Diff on scale 1-10. 1 - hardest
Availability of learning mats. 1-10
Use in real life 1-10
And links to any sites or such that you know of, if you don't mind.
e.g.
German
Because it's the second most used language on the internet (include other reasons if you like)
7
8
6-7
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German
Something like that. You don't have to use the template if you don't wish to, you could just write an explanation why I should learn this or that, like most top contributors do.
I know it's a lot, but I'd really appreciate it.
ALSO! Don't be shy to put more than one language.
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Filed under: Spanish Lessons
Your friend is quite correct. Norwegian and Swedish are very similar. Some claim that were it not for the fact that each is a national language (but see below) they would be considered different dialects, not languages. Actually the languages of Scandinavia (that is, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese) are all North Germanic languages, so related, and perhaps a common parent language about 1000 years ago. (Finnish is quite different, and not even Indo-European.)
Here is a major difference: Norwegian was influenced by Danish for 400 years, when Norway was a Danish province, and all culture, economy, education, church business was conducted in Danish. Thanks to a weakened Norway — the Black Death decimated more than 50% of the country– the written language in Norway pretty much disappeared. Swedish has had a continuous development.
Swedish has a few more conservative (in linguistic terms) traits .. for example it has more indefinite noun plural forms (-ar, -er, -or) endings, while Norwegian (like Danish) has basically -er. Same for verb past tenses.
Pronunciation is quite similar, although standard Norwegian shows more diphthongs.
One other answer points out that Norwegian has two standard written forms: bokmål (more Dano-Norwegian) and nynorsk (based on the western dialects, less influenced by Danish).
As to where or how to learn them, you can go to the database my Univ of Minnesota maintains about where you can study about 300 less commonly taught languages (all but French, German, Spanish, and English) in North America (see first link below).
I am a Norwegian teacher and have my own website (2nd web site below) with a number of pointers to studying Norwegian on your own, including some old email lessons I sent out many years ago.
french!
i love that class. (:
I would LOVE to learn Russian, but at the moment I’m studying French for my exams, so Russian’s out the window
)
I hear that Icelandic is hard :/
French is really quite simple – it’s just the verb endings you have to get your head round!
Japanese I’ve also heard is hard because of all the symbols involved (and if you’re a native English speaker, which I’m assuming you are, you won’t be used to it
Personally? The Icelandic, Swedish and Norweigian would be useless to you unless you worked in one of those countries or went there frequently because the languages are only spoken in Iceland, Sweden and Norway! (Unlike English and French etc, which are spoken all over the place)
Good luck with whatever you pick ^.^