Which second foreign language could I choose to learn?

        Since elementary school, I always learned English as my first foreign language. I never expect learning other languages in my life time. When I first thought of learning second foreign language was because of my classmates. Some of my classmates enjoy watching Japanese animations and thus they learned Japanese to understand those animations more. Also, when I went to bookstores, I saw many books about learning Japanese. I gradually thought of learning second foreign language as many other people did, but I did not buy a book and learn any foreign languages.

        After entering senior high school, I began to listen to k-pop. For a long period of time, the way I listened to the music was to find Chinese translation and hummed the melody of the songs because I did not understand any Korean. When I could gradually tell some members of some groups, I found it hard to memorize their names when watching some videos with Korean subtitles. One day when I was phubbing my cellphone, a video came into my screen. It was a video about learning Korean alphabets fast, and I clicked into the video to see what I could learn and kill time. The video taught Korean in interesting way instead of only teaching the viewer how to pronunciation. After watching the video, I began to try to spell and read Korean when watching videos about k-pop idols. After about two months, I went back to the same video and watch it seriously. I repeated the mode of watching videos about k-pop and the video that taught beginners Korean alphabets, and I was more and more used to watch k-pop videos and spell some vocabulary out.

        After I became a college student, I decided to learn second foreign language seriously. I was hesitated to choose from many languages. At first, I wanted to learn Japanese because many of my friends were also learning Japanese, and some of them even studied in department of Japanese. Japanese words were also common to see on the streets and on the Internet. However, I also wanted to learn Korean because I found myself really enjoyed listening to k-pop, and I was really annoyed when finding a video that was worth watching but without Chinese or English subtitles. I also knew that some lyrics were hard to translate from Korean into Chinese, and actually the fact that translation could not convey 100% meaning of one language to another was always true.

        Besides the two languages, I also considered learning European languages like German and Spanish, which were said that I could have more competitiveness in the future. But two of my friends who had learned German persuaded me not to learn it because learning German was not easy. They also told me that I might learn it toughly because there was less opportunity for me to use this language in daily life, and I might eventually lose interests when learning. Other friends gave similar respond when I discussed learning Spanish with them. After thinking the language learning again and again for over one month during the summer vacation, eventually I chose Korean and began to learn it when I was a sophomore.


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