Which foreign language class should I choose?

MANDARIN. MANDARIN. MANDARIN. MANDARIN. MANDARIN.

French is the easiest, by far, because of its similarities to English (grammar structure especially) and because of the simplicity of its verb transformations and conjugations. Because my school didn't offer Mandarin, I took French, and because I took an additional course over the summer, was able to master the language within 3 years of schooling (that is to say, not counting the colloquialisms -- you have to learn that by actually living in a French-speaking country or region).

Spanish would be next easiest for an English speaker to learn, because it has the same alphabet - but has some strange grammar rules and, when spoken, is probably one of the more difficult of these four languages to comprehend or pick up.

Mandarin is probably on the medium-hard scale, being very difficult to write but easier (at least, I think) than Japanese to speak, because its grammar structure is (at least, more) similar to the English structure. BUT TAKE THIS ONE!!!! I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW IMPORTANT THIS LANGUAGE IS TO TAKE!!! It spans across many countries, is spoken by approximately 1/5 of all people in the world, and is very very very very useful for business, any kind of foreign-involved jobs, travel, etc. etc. etc.

Japanese is very difficult to write, because it combines three different writing styles - kanji, katakana, and hiragana, all possibly in the same sentence. Its grammatical structure is also very different from English, and would be difficult to master, as opposed to other languages like French or Spanish.

I think Japanese, and I only answered for the one idiot that already answered that the "Japanese language is hard to write" etc etc.

No, it isn't! There are 3 writing systems, yes, but they work together. It's definitely a lot easier than Mandarin, which is written in ALL kanji. For Japanese, hiragana/katakana very similar. The kanji isn't very hard to learn, either. As for the grammatical system, it's all very structuralized; once you memorize or learn the patterns, it doesn't matter that it's SOV rather than the SVO that English uses (which does NOT matter at all, it does not make learning the language difficult). Grammar is the EASIEST part of learning Japanese!

Really, the only difficult thing about learning Japanese besides memorizing how to write (not read, WRITE) kanji is the short, casual forms/slang used (just like idioms and slang in English).

In fact, I feel that as an English speaker that originally started learning Spanish/tagalog, Japanese is one of the easiest languages I've learned.

To obtain middle-school/high school aged conversational fluency in 4-5 years is not uncommon.

Mandarin is actually very useful for your future considering a large percentage of the world's population speaks it. It's also very interesting to learn, since I have learned a little bit of it myself. Some friends have taken 2 years and think it's very easy to learn, and have a lot of fun while doing so.

French is relatively easy once you can memorize patterns in the nouns/verbs, etc. I've taken a year of that and LOVED it.

Spanish is a fun language to learn and not that difficult.

Use Firefox as your browser and install the Firefox AddOn IM Translator.

It translates English to Spanish very well, but you need to know a little Spanish when translating Spanish to Engish

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imt...

A good basic starter is to buy the book 'Spanish in five minutes a day' (Barnes & Noble have it).

French is a language that is, unless you live where it is spoken, not that useful.

Mandarin - where are you going to use it in the future? OK, it's challenging to learn but if you are not going to use it much then you are likely to forget most of it.

Spanish is very useful as there are a lot of similarities with both Italian and Portuguese, so you can then progress to know all 3.

French! It seems harder, but its not. The vocab is the toughest phase. I take it, and i find it irresistible manner higher than german and spanish. French is sincerely the most wellknown international language studied after english ( in the world).For those who do prefer german, you will have to prob appear at english words due to the fact they are probably the most customary langs. Between french, german, spanish, and english. You will have to prob recognize that german is apart of the indo-european group.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Asd_X...