Thank you all for the excellent, thoughtful responses. Even ethnolog published and warned several times about the gravity of the situation, so maybe you can find it there. Well, you may be drawn to a foreign language because you’re in love with a culture. “Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity.” This comes on wikipedia but also in many dictionaries. The website http://8sidor.se has articles written in simple Swedish and is a good site for practicing reading and you can also listen to the news there (select "lyssna på lättlista nyheter"). To my untrained ear, a lot of Danish sounds slurred and garbled, whereas Swedish words sound much more distinct. And as others have stated, there are more swedish speakers in the world, so you have a better chance to practice. If I have been too presumptuous, all is not lost, as the best way to learn by you’re mistakes made to others, is to experience how it feels. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. I’m confident, you have a great readers’ base already! I also love learning languages. i guess the poster wanted to know which scandinavian language is the easiest to learn. And I’d say that the same thing happened to most of the endangered languages that are not worth learning, but on that, I don’t have any statistic. Thus, it makes sense that I would like to learn one of these languages. Finland has a Finnish-Swedish bilingual policy officially. I agree with Rich. Huh... that's interesting to know, actually. Swedish is also an official language in Finland. German has little trickier grammar but the basic words are very similar to Anglo Saxon English words: milk/Milch for example. I would have thought, that the top priority in learning any language is to be understood by the people who speak it. It can be frustrating because I want to practice my Swedish, but in the end, their English is always better than my Swedish, so we just end up speaking English. Brazil is still the largest economy in Latin America, and it isn’t too hard to learn for native English speakers. . Snapshot - I was in a bar and was talking to the owners, who were 2 young men of Iraqi heritage. But realistically, you won't be able to "use" much of anything you learn. wonderful put up, very informative. Bokmål Norwegian is closer to Danish, and has been described in jest as "Danish spoken with a Swedish accent". Blessings to all! They both spoke Arabic, Swedish and almost perfect English. By most second language standards, he speaks Danish pretty fluently. Here are the top languages, and why they're useful to learn. It's crude but amusing. I'm guessing that they spoke other languages as well. I get the feeling you’re an academic, as in, you haven’t been laid off suddenly, walked out of a building with a box of your stuff because the company’s stock didn’t do so well this year, receiving (no matter how many years you worked with that company) no severance, perhaps your 401k slashed due to whatever economic hellstorm lead to your lay-off to begin with, and unemployment benefit checks that won’t even cover your health insurance much less your rent, and for a maximum of 6 months at best. Which do you recommend? I'd guess that the more regular pitch accent-rules (the source of the adjective "smoothness" used in your post I'd believe) in Norwegian might be preferable for/easier on learners, especially if ones native language lack pitch usage altogether. Well from a global perspective they aren’t as useful, economic or as widely spoken as the above. Generally, this would be the more phonologically complex. I speak some Swedish (not fluent, but I can get by) and can understand Norwegian much better than Danish. Chances are if you’re reading this post, you already have a pretty clear idea as to what foreign language you’d like to learn. Aside from English, I speak Spanish and Swahili. Everything we’ve ever written about language learning, all in one place. For European languages, Russian and Latin itself have reputations for being more difficult than normal in terms of grammar. I can’t believe I have to say this but languages are not in our genes. Many years ago it was quite boring to say that women should be able to work and get equally paid as men, but now we sort of crossed that line (sort of, not that we actually crossed it). Which language will help your career? So, here is my question - what language would you all recommend for me to learn?
