What is the recommended language portfolio in western Europe?
92391
Well, most of western Europeans speak German.\nThe biggest economy is Germany.\nThe most influential philosophies, music, and innovations are in Austria, Switzerland and Germany..\n\nI am not biased!.. hopefully :P\n\nSearch podcast.yahoo.com for "deutsch lernen" or "learn german".. you'll find some helpful audio lessons..\n\nViel Glueck! (Good luck!)
562827
it depends where you are going to work or study.\nfor example, there are very good engineering departments in Italy...there you could speak either English ( so no need for another language) or Italian...
132823
NEVER use babelfish - it's absolute rubbish - only good for one-word-only translations.\n\nHow about these for topics:\n\nweather\nfavourite animal/food/song/colour\nhow many people in their family\nhow they get to school
567697
English, Spanish, French, German, Yiddish, Italian, some Hebrew (I'm a bit rusty), some Portuguese, a bit of Russian, a bit of Polish, ASL (American Sign Language), enough Tagalog to get by, assorted phrases in Gha, Ibo, Hindi and Urdu.\n\nI can also read Latin (High, Church and some Vulgate), Helenic Greek (slowly and not well), & Middle English.\n\nI guess I need a life!  :-)
37620
Knowing Spanish, it would be easy enough to learn any other Romance language...Italian, French, others. Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, and not sure, but there may be a third dialect that is used only in Spain...vosotros Spanish but maybe that is Portuguese. My guess is that pure aesthetics aside, though, (since all these languages have their own beauty) if you are faced with anything in a romance language and you already know one, you can figure out a lot of what you need to know in the others. IF your motive is purely to communicate with a wide variety of people.\n\nGerman doesn't seem all that hard and opens up another family of languages called the Germanic...which kind of stack on one another and learning one helps you learn another. German, Dutch, Yiddish, and the Scandanavian languages. \n\nIf you were traveling anywhere in W Europe, I would say that Spanish and German would help you a great deal.  \n\nBut if you really want to understand more about language, including English, learn LATIN. It will help you understand almost any language. It is what the romance languages are based on, if I'm not mistaken, and helps decipher the roots of many words.\n\nIf you are Catholic and want to understand the roots of your church better, learning Latin will be the key to that. And Latin in sacred music is absolutely beautiful.\n\nIf you want to study other languages that help you with Judeo Christian faith, try Greek, Hebrew, and again, Latin. If you are some other faith, study the language that was being used by the people who started that religion.\n\nFor pure fun, there are groups dedicated to studying Tolkien languages. Elvish and its dialects, Dwarvish, and I'm sure there are others. Tolkien was a linguistics professor. He created all the elements of Middle Earth, including the races, their histories, and their languages, LONG before the Lord of the Rings came out.
754762
Try Borders they have a big selection of foreign language books
484223
Pick something from a different family instead.  Russian or Greek.  It would be more challenging than any of the ones you mentioned because it isn't Germanic (like English) or Romance (like Spanish).\n\nBut if you want something easy, go for Italian.  If you speak Spanish, you will learn Italian in no time--assuming you don't get confused and start using words of one when you mean the other.
748958
Make sure you have all the proper language software downloaded.  I think you can get all the language packs at the Microsoft download page.
578111
Cool! I am currently in Germany with AFS. They really are a good program, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I almost went to Spain with AFS, but then I got a scholarship for Germany. I must tell you what AFS told me when I got accepted to Spain. You have to be ready to learn another dialect, which is so differnet from Spanish that it is almost anothe language. Learning Spanish in Spain is way different than learning it as a foreign language or in latin america.\nAs for a french speaking country. Of course there is France, thats a no brainer, and I must say France is beautiful. But if you to go Belgium, Luxembourg, The Neatherlands or parts to Switzerland you also have to chance of ending up learing more than one language, such as dutch, german, italian or even the native languge of luxembourg (in german luxemburgisch sorry I dont know the english name)\nBelgium is also a very interesting country, Luxembourg as well, but very very expensive. \nThere are so many options, and the best part is you cant go wrong!!!! \nIt is an adventure, and it is hard, and wonderful and one of the best things you can do! \nGood luck, and welcome to the club of people who understand foreign exchange!
533419
There are three choices -- Scots, Frisian and Dutch.\n\nIt just depends on how you define "different language", and if you think if matters how many speakers the language has.\n\nFirst, the "American" bit is nonsense -- American & British English are clearly dialects of one common language.\n\nLet's also discount various forms of "pidgin English" that have developed in some areas where English is not the native language.\n\nHow about GERMAN? -- No, not quite.  The language we know as German is actually "High German", so-called because it is spoken in the inland, elevated areas (originally spoken in "Prussia", the eastern part of modern Germany, this was the language of Luther), whereas English is more closely related to the "Low German" languages of the lowlands closer to the sea.\n\n1) So the first reasonable candidate is SCOTS, that is "Lowland Scots" or "Ulster Scots" (to distinguish it from the Gaelic language known as Highland Scots).   Some, however, simply treat this is a dialect of English.\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language\n\n2) The next closest, and clearly a distinct language is FRISIAN, "spoken by about half a million members of an ethnic group living on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. "\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_language\n\n3) If that's not a large enough group to count, you'd have to go with DUTCH.  (Compare also Low German dialects in the Northwestern part of Germany, such as "Plattdeutsch", and Afrikaans, which was originally a Dutch dialect.)\nhttp://ucl.ac.uk/dutch/why_dutch/index.html\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language#Classification_and_related_languages
274180
You must get a language pack .
172492
Be sure you have www.yahoo.com and chek: see, codification, select for instance, occidental european (ISO).
806629
Choose the language that you are the most passionate about.  \nIf you love Italian hillsides and the beauty of Tuscany choose Italian!  \nIf you want to hold St. Peterburg in the palm of your hand and squeeze it so hard the juice runs into youir heart choose Russian!\nEtc., Etc
583758
west europe ....\n\ngood luck
692860
Which language are you looking for and how much do you want to learn?\n\nTeachionary will give you basic vocabulary for several languages.\n\nRosetta stone has a demo that will allow you to try their learning system in several languages.\n\nI haven't tried eTandem, but it looks like something that may help you, once you get past the first sentences.  http://www.slf.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/\n\nEurocosm advertises free language learning for European language:  http://www.eurocosm.com/\n\nInfo on Japanese language learning resources:  http://www.sabotenweb.com/bookmarks/language.html\n\nCheck out this page of links for other resources:  http://www.foreignlanguagehome.com/topics/links/index.htm\n\nGood luck!
1091963
it depends on where you live and where you want to go,  like if you want to backpack Europe one day you should learn a european language.
1169522
u can learn portughese!! it's pretty similar to spanish!! // italian sounds good too/ FRENCH  it's like HARD GURL!! so stick to those 2!!:)