Learn a language.
Ten of them written up honestly: what stops people, and what is different about learning it in a conversation.
- Japanese日本語You can hold a conversation in Japanese long before you can read one.
- SpanishEspañolThe grammar is regular. The problem is that nobody speaks a textbook.
- Korean한국어The alphabet takes an evening. Everything after that is the interesting part.
- Mandarin Chinese中文There is no conjugation, no gender and no plurals. There are characters and tones.
- FrenchFrançaisYou can read it long before you can hear it, which is the wrong way round.
- GermanDeutschPronunciation is honest and the grammar is where the work is.
- ArabicالعربيةTwo hard things at once: a new script and a language built on roots.
- ItalianItalianoThe friendliest of the big European languages to start, and it stays hard in one place.
- PortuguesePortuguêsEasy to read, harder to hear, and two versions of it worth choosing between.
- EnglishEnglishThe reading is easy and the spelling is a liar.
72languages
Rooms work in every one of them, and you can study any of them. These ten have pages because they are the ones people set out to learn.