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Re:Ask HN: Can someone talk me out of learning new languages by rococode on Monday November 16, 2020 @01:54AM (#25108894)
I'm biased as a language lover and wannabe polyglot, but I think new languages are a great skill to learn and certainly practical (if your goal isn't only to learn something that helps you make more money). Learning a language unlocks a whole new culture for you - both online and if you travel to a country that speaks it. Depending on the language it can also help at home (Spanish in the US, for example). For traveling in particular, if you speak the native language fluently it really opens up a very different experience than going around as an English-speaking tourist, it's very cool and fun.

That being said, focus on just one new language. Three at once is extremely hard to balance without committing a very serious amount of time and having a high level of natural language learning talent. The easiest languages to learn with English as your native language take around 500 hours to reach conversational proficiency [1] which is an hour or two a day, try to learn 3 languages at once and that's nearly a full time job. If you dedicate yourself to spending an hour every day it's realistic to reach conversational fluency in a year and a half or so, if you go more casually it might take 3-5 years or longer.

[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ (this is for full professional proficiency, you can probably converse smoothly with less than that)

Re:Ask HN: Can someone talk me out of learning new languages by kevindeasis on Monday November 16, 2020 @02:42AM (#25109148)
I see so 1 language is a more realistic goal

Thanks for the advice

Re:Ask HN: Can someone talk me out of learning new languages by garmaine on Monday November 16, 2020 @06:32AM (#25110512)
It matters a huge amount which languages you're looking at, and which languages you already know. Learning Spanish is a heck of a lot easier than learning Chinese for an English speaker, for example.

What languages are you looking at, and which do you speak already?

You might find this forum helpful:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/default.asp