Which language should you learn?

In one word: English

If you speak English well already, then: Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic or Russian

If you need to learn a language for work, then: learn the language of the country where you will be working, or the country at which your work will be aimed at.

If you'd just like to learn a language because you like learning languages, then: pick whichever language you are attracted to emotionally.

Learning languages has always been very popular. At least in countries where learning foreign languages is necessary. The most important language from where I come from to learn is English and if you would ask me, which language should you learn or work on for economic or career reasons, I would not hesitate one moment and say, you should learn English. The languages you should choose to learn however often do not depend on how much money you can make knowing them or by how much better your career prospects will be. Many factors are very individual and greatly depend on the reason why you'd might want to learn the language more than anything (obviously).

The reason

There are several reasons why you might want to learn a foreign language and usually it's one of the following:

• interest
• curiosity
• career
• hobby
• relocation
• studies
• future prospects
• self-cultivation
• partner or family member

In some of these you don't have a choice (your new French monolingual mother-in law is a fact that cannot be changed) in some however you have quite a few options.

What should your choice be based on? These are a few questions you should be asking yourself:

Which language do you love?
Which language sounds nice to you?
Which culture are you driven to naturally?
Which country will you live in?
Do people there speak your native language or English well?
Will you need the language in order to exist/work/study in that country or can you survive with English?
How much time do you have to learn it?
Do you learn languages easily or do you struggle?
Do you have enough resources to learn the language you want to learn?
How hard is the language you want to learn?
Do you have an idea about how long it will take you to learn it to be functional in it?
Do you have that time?
Do you have enough opportunities to practice the language?
Will your partner learn English (or your native language) faster than you will learn their native language?
Is it even important that you learn that language?
What will the most important language in the near future be?

The answers to most of the above questions are very individual except for the following:

Which is the most important language for the future?

For the near future, on an international level, without a doubt English. If you are deciding about which language you should learn as an investment into your personal future and your English is still not fluent, I would invest all the time into perfecting your English. 

On a local level, there are languages which surpass English in importance (such as Russian in the post-Soviet area, Spanish in South America, French in the French-speaking part of Africa, Mandarin Chinese in China and so on), but globally, there is no language which can rival the importance of English at this moment and for the near future to come. I would not bet all of my money that it will remain that way in my lifetime, but in the following 20 years it surely will. 

The interesting question thus is, which is the second language you should learn in addition to your fluent English. Here the most important factors are:

• Do you have a specific reason why you want to learn your second foreign language? Work? Partner? Hobby?
• Or do you just want to learn a language, because it might come in handy in the future? 

In the first case, the answer is very obvious. Learn the language of the country where you will work, the language your partner speaks and if its your hobby, then which ever language you feel like learning at the moment. 

There are several things that need to be considered in the second case scenario:

Disregarding the fact, that in the coming 20 years, more and more people in the world will be proficient in English (learning an additional second foreign language will thus be less and less important), knowing a second additional language will be strongly tied to the type of work you will be doing and the country that work will be carried out in or aimed at. In other words, you learn the language you will use for your work. Since this is reverse engineering in a way and it's impossible to tell what work you might do, again we are left with the question what the safest top 5 languages to learn will be (having future development in mind).

In this case, very generally, you either pick a total niche language of a country where relatively fewer people speak English and become "the only person on the block" who speaks that language raising your market value and look for a company which needs you, or you choose one of the top 5 next best bets after English and become very proficient in that language and look for a company which needs you.

You have chances to land a good job in both cases. Logically, if you're the only one who speaks a rare language (or even better, a language combination), even if there are not many companies or governmental agencies that can employ you, you will be one of the very few who can be employed. On the other hand if you learn one of the top 5 next most reasonable languages to learn after English, there will be a lot of people who will speak that language, but also more companies and governmental agencies offering jobs.

The 5 best options after English in my opinion (taking into account the number of speakers, economic strength, number of countries in which the languages are lingua franca, the possibility that you will work in a country where the language is spoken and enjoy your life there, or work with customers from that country etc.) would be:

Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic and Russian

These languages pretty much cover the whole world. Notice that 3 out of 5 of these languages (Mandarin, Arabic and Russian) are languages considered to be extremely hard to master for western language speakers and in order to reach functional fluency you will need anywhere from 2-6 years of intensive studies depending on several factors (talent, conditions, time etc.).

Ultimately, as mentioned at the beginning of this post it all comes down to simple logic. The most important language to learn today is English. The next 5 most reasonable languages are Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic and Russian. If you need to learn a language to get a job, learn the language that job requires. If you want to learn a language for fun, learn whichever language you are attracted to emotionally.

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