What language to take from scratch?

Hopefully depending on my a level results, I'm going to take a gap year and reapply for modern languages. I currently study Spanish and love it so much and I used to study French too. I have no idea what second language to pick up tho and have been deliberating between German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.
If anyone has any advice I'd appreciate it a lot :smile:

Reply 1

username3824906

Italian and Portuguese are supposedly similar to Spanish!

Reply 2

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Broadly speaking they're all Indo-European languages so there will be some similarity between all of them, although German and Russian are from different branches (and Russian has a different script). I gather Russian is pretty complex grammatically so probably would be the hardest to pick up between that, the different script, and being from an unfamiliar (probably, unless you speak Polish or something already) branch of the IE tree.

What do you want to do after your degree? How do you think the different language choices will help with that? If you aren't planning to do anything language related after your degree, think more about the cultures, literatures, and histories of each of the country/countries that speak the target language and which you think would be most interesting to learn about.

Reply 3

H4ttie03

Original post by Purplemonkeys

Italian and Portuguese are supposedly similar to Spanish!

Personally I'd disagree as I can't understand a word of portuguese or Italian lol

Reply 4

H4ttie03

Original post by artful_lounger

Yeah that's true, tbf I think I'm leaning more towards either Italian or German because of the cultures

Reply 5

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by H4ttie03

Yeah that's true, tbf I think I'm leaning more towards either Italian or German because of the cultures

There you go then :smile:

Although one thing for Portuguese, apparently it's very closely related to Spanish linguistically and also naturally Portugal has a lot of historic and cultural connections with Spain, so with your existing background in Spanish you may be able to pick up Portuguese a lot quicker and attain a higher level of language ability faster. It might also be interesting if you are particularly interested in Iberian culture and history generally, and not just Spain alone!

Reply 6

H4ttie03

Original post by artful_lounger

There you go then :smile:

Yeah that's true I think definitely I will consider 1 of the 3! I'll just have to decide which suits my historical, cultural and literature interests

Reply 7

penguingirl18

Original post by H4ttie03

Yeah that's true, tbf I think I'm leaning more towards either Italian or German because of the cultures

German would give you more variety in your studies, since Spanish, French and Italian are all Latin-based. Also, German would give you a background for later learning Scandinavian languages or Dutch, and Italian would be easier to learn later on if you already have a background in Spanish and French. (I might be biased though since I'm fluent in German. :smile:

What about the culture appeals to you?)

(edited 1 year ago)