this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I’m open to any more ideas you people might have, not that I’ll learn them all at the same time.
As a general suggestion then, for something easy I'd go for a Scandinavian language (Danish, Norwegian or Swedish). You only need one of them to kinda understand the others. For something harder Finnish or Estonian is interesting because of the many noun cases but not very useful. I don't know anything about Asian languages but Korean and Japanese would be next on my list.
Swedish is also spoken in Finland as a national language, and a mandatory school subject. They are all fluent in English regardless, but it's nice to be able to communicate in one of the local languages. It's the official language in the Åland Islands archipelago, and a second language all along the southern coast plus the greater Espoo/Helsinki area.
I've got full working proficiency in Norwegian (B2/C1 I guess, never took the Bergenstest) and can talk perfectly fine with a Swede. We understand 80-90% and can guess the rest. Danish is though though, the written language is 99% identical with Norwegian, but they have a very guttural way of forming sounds that makes it hard to understand. The pronunciation is closer related to Dutch than to any other Scandinavian language.
I've been learning Norwegian on and off for some time now. What I always found interesting is how much I can understand from written Swedish and Danish (+ Nynorsk) while still having difficulty with even basic spoken Norwegian if it isn't the most common Oslo accent.
I think that's probably also due to the fact that the most dominant dialect in Norwegian media seems to be the one from Bergen, somehow half of the country's actors, comedians and other celebrities are from there, so there is a way above average online presence there. And Bergans is the hardest Norwegian accent to understand (the Ylvis brothers for example speak Bergans). It's closer related to Danish than any other Norwegian dialect.
On the other side, Norway has some 500 local dialects that differ slightly from one another, when I was living there people always tried to guess which region I was from, and nobody actually thought I'm not Norwegian at all, so that was fun.
If you want to practice your listening skills a bit, I'd really recommend watching Kongen Befaler (the Norwegian version of the Taskmaster comedy franchise). The Taskmaster subreddit has direct downloads in their wiki, also for the Swedish version (Bäst i Test) and Denmark (Stormester). Unfortunately there isn't a community on Lemmy and I'm lacking the time and commitment to start one myself.
That's some perfect timing as I came across Kongen Befaler like three days ago. It seems the reddit links also have subtitles which is really useful, thanks. And yeah I've also noticed a lot of actors and singers seem to have a more western accent. Duolingo definitely doesn't prepare you for that.