The question I hate the most is "what language should I study". Here is a short thread on why choosing a "profitable/worthwhile" language to learn is a mistake and won't get you anywhere by me, a historian who learned most languages of Eastern Europe ("useless"?) 1/10

Calculating the number of speakers or countries where a language is spoken is just bizarre. Where will you encounter the 918 million native speakers of Chinese? Will you really visit the 29 countries where French has an official status? For what purposes? Can't you use English?

A "useful" language is a very relative concept. I've spent my life gaining reading knowledge of something like 30 European, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian languages. They define me as a historian now. They allow me to conduct research others cannot. It might not be a job...

market advantage, but my macrohistorical interest in the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires is sustained by the ability to read literature and sources in all these languages. Learning Chinese would not have helped me. At all. This brings me to my next point: You must have...

A strong sense of inner motivation. Those who learn Chinese because it's profitable will likely not go very far into the process. Learning a language is much like getting in shape. The results and rewards are not immediate, you have many difficult mountains to climb, and it...

always feels like reaching a top is an achievement tempered by an even higher peak that you can now see but not reach. It requires a sense of purpose. For me, it was history, literature, and Eastern Europeans that I loved and cared about. Those who just download Duolingo...

mostly stick to it, if they do and most don't, because it is bit-sized and ends before it gets very difficult. If you learn a language for business, knowing the basics of the language might not have the job market advantages you imagine -- this requires fluency...

"What language should I study?", thus, is a deeply personal question. Like choosing a dissertation topic. It is something you'll live with for years or drop out. If you are serious about it, you need to find out what highly coveted prize awaits you on the other shore. For me...

It was a combination of writing larger histories of Eastern Europe and the ability to live among Eastern Europeans. Studying Eastern European languages has transformed my life in a way studying a combination of Chinese and Spanish possibly couldn't. That's also because...

Language learning, when done purposefully, is a deeply transformative process. That's my PSA-cum-TED-Talk for the next stranger commenting on the time I wasted studying useless languages like Albanian instead of Chinese, "the language of the future".