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I was thinking this morning that I could, on a whim, start learning a new language, and for once by that I don’t mean a programming language. The thing is that even if I start doing so on a whim, this would lead to a multi-year effort, so even if learning a new language is a whim, which one to pick isn’t.

So let’s break them down into multiple criteria, rate them, and pick the best. The first would be proximity to Latin or Germanic languages, more specifically French and English, the closer the easier it will be. The second would be how easy it would be to have some kind of cultural immersion, be it with other people or with media (and thus rate the Internet-connectedness of a language). Which leads to another criterion, I’d say cultural variety, because I’d prefer a language with not too many divergent regionalisms. An obvious one but difficult to measure objectively and à priori is grammar difficulty (I assume nothing can be as difficult as French). Which leads to script difficulty, both in terms of number of characters but also how many times writing cannot be inferred by the pronunciation. Finally, there’s simply overall usefulness, be it with conversing with other people or reading things online that would be of interest to me.

I mentioned “Internet-connectedness” because now the great advantage we get for cultural immersion is that as more and more media, be it video, audio or writing, is available online, we do not need to go through the stress of moving to another country altogether just to learn a new language. I say that because I’m not kind of person that has quite a lot of trouble in understanding grammar unless I see it enough time in context until “it clicks”, meaning I depend a lot on immersion to learn.

At any rate, I’ll start compiling the ratings of each of those criteria for a bunch of languages on another day.