Lanugages

do duolingo

>>17740260
I speak Polish and Russian conversationally (fluent-ish but I still trip over my words sometimes), can read and write them somewhat better, and I've studied most of the languages you mentioned. I feel pretty confident in telling you that unless you're going to have daily forced exposure to the language (e.g. French-speaking girlfriend who doesn't want to speak English, you're actually going to be living in the country in question, etc) then THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is to pick a language that's tied to a culture you're actually interested in, so you'll have easily-accessible and INTERESTING materials to learn off of. I don't mean textbooks and tapes, understand -- I mean movies, TV shows, games, comics, books, and so on, because material aimed at learners will only take you so far.

Russians don't really dub many movies, for instance, their dubs are of terrible quality when they do -- their TV is pretty bad and there isn't much of a Russian comics industry, which pretty much leaves you with novels, which are hard for beginners. That made the whole thing about ten times harder. Are you interested in French comics or Spanish telenovelas? Then pick one of those languages. Japanese is the "hardest" of the languages you named but you can't move online without tripping over Japanese-language media so I might honestly give you the best odds of learning that, if you're going to be studying on your own.

Esperanto isn't remotely useful but it's dead easy and has a very dedicated and helpful online community so you could probably get to the point of being comfortable chatting online in it in a matter of months, and it might prime you to pick up a third language more easily. Your choice.

Not OP, but I'm also interested in learning languages. I speak English, Chinese, Cantonese, and intermediate Spanish and Japanese.

Does anyone know how to make a career out of this, if at all possible?

>>17740443
You already speak Mandarin and Cantonese? Natively? Fluently?

With the skills you already have, you could be a translator. Not an interpreter -- on-the-fly translation takes a lot of training and not everybody has the innate ability to do it -- but you could work for a translation agency (depending on where you live and want to work it might help to get certified but it's not always necessary, and it's easy-peasy anyway). Alternately you could take an interpretation course (a lot of universities offer decent ones) although that's a challenging career to pursue and takes a lot more education. And it's competitive.

Alternately you could work in international business or for the Foreign Service (or your country's equivalent if you're not American), but I'm afraid I wouldn't know a thing about either of those.

In the meantime, there's plenty of translation jobs posted on freelance websites like Upwork, and considering there aren't zillions of people who speak Chinese (of any sort) and English fluently, the competition for them isn't too bad. In the meantime while you figure out what you want to do and pursue any necessary education or training, that'd earn you some extra cash and help you build up a portfolio.

>>17740443
Translate at the United Nations in New York City.

>>17740405
Thanks for the advice I feel much more confident in learning a different language/s

>>17740472
>>17740478
Cheers. My English is actually slightly better than my Chinese now because of lack of contact with the language in general, but I guess I can brush it up a bit.

It'd be sweet to earn some extra cash while I'm doing my degree (not language-related tho).

>>17740260
I just needed to say that I fucking laughed my ass off at ur pic op. holy fuck