There is no single right answer to “which language should I learn?”, but there are wrong ones: choosing what is fashionable, choosing what is “easiest”, or learning whatever everyone else is learning. The right question is: what will I use this language for?
Start with the goal
Migration and residence. The destination decides the language and usually demands a certificate too: German for Germany, Austria and Switzerland (A1 to B1 depending on the route), French for France, Spanish for Spain. Here the choice is not really yours.
Work. Look at which language pays in your sector. In tourism and logistics, German and Russian; in technology and foreign trade, English; in firms working with the Gulf, Arabic.
University. Check the language of the programme. Germany has English-taught master’s degrees, but daily life and internships still require German — plan for both.
Family and culture. This is the most sustainable motive. An emotional connection is what keeps you going when motivation drops.
Estimate the effort honestly: language distance
How long a language takes depends heavily on its distance from your own. For a Turkish speaker, Azerbaijani becomes usable within months while Japanese or Chinese needs several times the hours — the writing system alone adds months.
This is not advice to avoid hard languages. It is advice to plan realistically: badly estimated time is the most common reason people quit.
Commonly chosen languages, honestly assessed
English. The widest use — work, university, the internet — and the most competition, which means “I speak English” is not by itself distinguishing. Moving from B2 to C1 opens more doors than moving from A2 to B1.
German. The most concrete return for Turkish and Iranian learners: work, vocational training and university in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It has a hard reputation but is easier than expected for speakers of verb-final languages such as Turkish and Persian.
French. Canadian immigration routes (especially Québec), African markets, diplomacy. Spelling sits far from pronunciation, so listening is hard at first.
Russian. Trade and tourism, and Central Asian connections. Cyrillic is learned faster than people expect — a few days; the real difficulty is noun cases.
Arabic. Sectors working with the Gulf, and religious texts. Dialect matters: Modern Standard Arabic is the written language, while conversation needs the dialect of your destination.
Spanish. Very many speakers and relatively approachable, though in a Turkish or Iranian context its direct career return is lower than the others.
Learning two languages at once
Possible, but not recommended — especially if both are at beginner level and resemble each other (Spanish and Italian), where interference is likely. Taking one to B1 and then starting the second is almost always faster.
The exception: if one is already advanced, adding a second causes little trouble.
If you cannot decide
Stuck between two? Try both for a week and measure one thing: which one did you not postpone? Sustainability matters more than being theoretically more useful, because a language you abandon returns nothing.
We teach 13 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Persian. Each has a free placement test and a free first lesson — trying before choosing beats regretting afterwards.