memes

I'm not really obsessing over anything. I've got a casual interest in linguistics as a field and I want to study languages as a long-term hobby. I chose Chinese for my first secondary language for a couple reasons.

1. Understanding Chinese opens up a lot of stuff that isn't available to me in English. If I want to read Spanish-language news, or great Spanish-language works of literature, most likely I can find those professionally translated into English. But there's a lot of stuff in Chinese that simply no one is interested in translating.

2. I would like to visit China, and I would feel awkward going to someone else's country and not being able to communicate with them for at least basic tasks in their own language. I don't have to be an expert, but if I need to know where the bathroom is I don't want to have to pester people until one of them goes and gets their uncle who speaks English.

3. Chinese is known for being a particularly difficult language for English-speakers to learn. I figure that if I can learn it, then I can learn any language, which is a big confidence/motivation boost for my language-learning efforts moving forward.

Once I know enough Chinese to have proper conversations in it, I intend to start working on learning Spanish. Spanish specifically because it's the most practical secondary language for me to have. 9 times out of 10 when I'm going, "Damn, I wish we had somebody to hand who spoke [language]" that language was Spanish. (The other 1/10 is split halfway between Chinese and Korean)

After Spanish, I've got a long list of "tertiary interest" sort of languages I'd like to tackle someday, and those languages are from all over the globe.