Ask HN: Best second language to learn?

It depends where you live and what you are hoping to use it for? E.g. if you do business in Asia, then Mandarin chinese would be the most valuable. Personally I like Italian/French/Spanish/Portuguese since they are reasonably easy to learn.

Speaking multiple languages is a great thing, but if you already speak English, maybe you ought to consider if its worth your time if you don't have a clear goal in mind.

Do you want to learn a new language for the sake of knowledge? To travel the world? For business?

I would figure that out first and then make a choice on what to do.

Spanish: It's the second most spoken language in the world. French: It's spoken officially in 33 countries, most of them in Africa which is developing fast.

If you choose to learn a new language, I'd suggest to do it for the joy of learning and discovering something new. The fact that you ask which one is the most valuable shows that you don't feel you need another language for any practical purpose. Don't look for the easiest or "most valuable" (whatever that might mean). Look for one you'd enjoy.

You can check out some online language learning communities such as UniLang or HowToLearnAnyLanguage for a lot of discussion on this.

As far as resources for learning languages, I have been using Duolingo (http://www.duolingo.com/) to learn German over the past few months, and can't praise it highly enough.

They currently offer German, Spanish, and French (which is in beta). It's in private beta, but I recently had an influx of friends added to the site, so it seems like they're sending out invites pretty regularly.

CPops is right. What is the end goal? I found Swedish easier to learn than French; (more) simple grammar, very similar to English in many ways. Tolkien/saga-style English, at least. Ties to northern British traditional slang and place names of interest also. But I earn the majority of my living from French.

stevenbrianhall - I'm no fan of Duolingo. I wanted it to work well, but it let me down. The voice rec is a gimmick, the material doesn't seem to be able to take you very far. Also, as a translator I find the idea of relying on crowdsourced translation too great a risk.

For anyone interested in language learning techniques and startups, would you happen to know how to legally protect an audio-only teaching method? I presume it would fall under the legal area of copyright, but the technique I'm developing would be easily copied. Do I need to just bite the bullet and trust in copyright law?

I'm not normally jumpy about IP but I would like a few years to try to market this one as my own.

It will be hard to learn a language without the motivation of needing (or wanting) it for a specific goal.

I'm currently learning spanish with the aim of it being useful when I take my family on a extended tour around south america sometime in 2014 or 2015. I don't expect to be fluent by then, but hopefully am able to learn enough to get by. (I spent time in France last year, having not made the effort to learn any french - not an experience I would recommend!)

For actual tools, I'm currently using Anki (specifically ankidroid). This is just a brute force tool for rapidly increasing vocabulary (similar to supermemo) but free. Previously I have tried Rosetta stone, but although easy, I found it to be an incredibly slow way of making progress.

Take what I say with a grain of salt though - I'm still only learning so I'm far from an expert in this area =)

I'd go with Spanish or French if you want fast learning. Mandarin (Simplified) Chinese otherwise for practical reasons. Japanese and Korean are much easier to learn than Chinese if it is too tough.

Learn a non-germanic language since you already know a germanic one. Plenty to choose from: Hungarian, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, etc.

C#.

the easiest language for english speakers to learn would have to be swedish, its very similiar and its grammar is about as simple as that of english, but there's not much value in it even if you go to sweden, since everyone speaks english. I'd say if you want a valuable language (besides english which is by far the most valuable in the world today), go with spanish for the americas, german for europe, and chinese for asia, all of these languages are very valuable and german and chinese bring with them booming economies.

I've had a better time learning German than other languages just because my grandparents were German speakers. So as a small child I heard sounds which help my accent today. So just another of the many things to consider when making this choice. If you want to _speak_ as opposed to just read then you might look to a language others spoke around you when you were little. Even if they just had an accent.