Picking a language to learn?

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So I'm designing my "personal semester" class schedule, and I've decided to add a foreign language. I can get Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur Programs at a discount through my college, but I don't know which one to pick.

-Japanese
Love anime and japanese live action. Would be my preferred way, and I can "get" the gist of it without subtitles now. (I would prefer this one, I could do translation work with fansub groups maybe, but I wouldn't have any way to practice it in person.)
-German
Fiance from Austria, friend, and her family speak it. Want to learn it to be able to teach it to our children, and if we ever visit Austria.
-Spanish(Latin America)
Latino/Latina population is becoming more common. Act as a translator. Looks really good on a resume. (Fiance also speaks Spanish.)

Thoughts?

Good idea - depending upon your academic/career goal, learning a 2nd (or 3rd) language is advantageous. I'm not language orientated, but I appreciate those who do it.




Asian languages are notoriously hard for a native Westerner to learn. Plus, you'd surely need more than a semester or two to master Japanese.




If you perusing maths/science, then German is a good background language. German is widely spoken in Europe, so this could be a good choice.



Latin languages are amongst the easiest to learn (for a native English speaker). In America, Spanish is widely spoken so it can be useful. French would always be a good choice! Portuguese is widely spoken in South America, and would be a good related choice too. There are actually 4 romance languages, although 3 are most recognised: French, Italian and Spanish. The 4th is Romanian. In fact, Romanian is closely related to French.

Anyhow, good luck and enjoy whatever you choose.

Spanish!!
I've heard it's hard to learn it (for non-native speakers), but I don't think so.

And German is good if you like science.

Spanish is a pretty easy language to learn, except for the really complex verb conjugation rules. German has more similarities to English than Spanish, but it has long compound words, because adjectives and nouns are usually combined into one word. Japanese is a lot different from English and usually takes a long time to learn, but if you are really good at thinking abstractly, you should be able to learn it faster than the average person.

I recommend just going with the language that you want to learn the most. Don't try to learn Russian or some other Slavic language unless you have a very strong desire to. The noun conjugation rules in Slavic languages are insanely difficult. If you want to study a language that's really easy for a native English speaker to learn, try Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. All 3 of them are pretty similar to each other, and have many similarities to English. Dutch is also supposed to be a pretty easy language to learn, but I don't know that much about it.

If you want to start learning the basics of a language, here's a pretty good website for it.

http://www.101languages.net/

Japanese would be the most fun and the most difficult and frustrating. It also would do nothing for your home life.
As much as I dislike German, (possibly the ugliest language on earth) that would be my choice because of family connections.
Spanish is the prettiest and easiest.

I think you should pick Spanish. It's a very easy language to pick up and it's very useful if you live in the US.
However, don't rely on just our advice. Pick a language that will fascinate and inspire you to learn.
Good luck!

In terms of a challenge, Japanese is an excellent option. I'm assuming you're a westerner, so it's going to be a nice challenge for you if you get inclined to go that way.

In terms of practicality, Spanish would work nicely. Many people speak it these days, and like you said before, it looks good on a resume. The similarities to English would make it less of a challenge, but at the same time, they're not exactly alike.

German is the most similar to English, so it's remarkably easier to learn than the previous two. It's kind of fun to speak it aloud, too.

The culture is just so awesome, too. One of my best friends is a native born German, and she has taught me a lot of German over the time I've known her. It's pretty awesome.

I guess it's just up to you.

Choose Spanish or German.

It's your choice. If it's your first second language, I'd recommend staying clear of Japanese as it's super complicated and it's something you might want to tackle after having practical experience of learning a language and confidence in your methods of doing so. However, you won't stick with a language if you don't have the enthusiasm. Whichever one you want to do, go for it.

Also, can I recommend you don't go with Rosetta Stone. Pimsleur is much better, but get something else to supplement it as it's not too great on reading and writing skills.

Spanish as every country south of the USA, except Brazil and a couple of other very small ones speaks it. Also Chinese as it is a major force in Asia.

If you have issues with comprehension I wouldn't recommend a foreign language like Spanish...I found that out the hard way when I started my second semester of Spanish.

Honestly, I found French to be easier to read and comprehend as it's structured similar to the English language. I really regret not taking French but I'm in Spanish because I live on the west coast of the United States and there are a lot of Spanish-speaking people here.

Take German! I'm Latina but opted to take German since middle school. It's very very similar to English, quite easy really, and I can always get relatives to teach me Spanish!

Japanese: People above have said it's very difficult for a Westerner and do you really want to invest that much time in learning a whole new alphabet/set of characters?
Spanish: It's probably useful because you live in the US, and because your fiancé speaks it, they can (presumably) help you with any problems you have and proof-read anything, etc. (This will be very useful.) However, what kind of cheap(er) language-learning programme will you get? Is it from a European based company or a States based one? Presumably you want to speak the kind of Spanish spoken in Mexico, etc? Because, well, European Spanish (the kind spoken in Spain) has some differences - you lisp your c's, etc.
German: This is probably your best bet. The structure is very close to English and I (having learnt it for five years) had less problems with the pronunciation than I am having now with Spanish. I really enjoyed German. That said, again, the language programme and tuition you will get will probably be for Standard German, that is, Hochdeutsch. It's a bit like RP in England. You said your fiancé is from Austria? Well, in different regional areas they have different accents. (E.g. my mom, when she was in Bavaria, people would go on in a thick Bavarian accent and she wouldn't understand any of it.) Then, in different countries they have different, well, lots of stuff as far as I can tell. Example: Swiss German is totally different to Hochdeutsch. And Austrian German is probably different to the Hochdeutsch you will end up learning.
Dutch?:apparently it's quite easy and like a mixture of English and German.
P.S. That all said, looking at the date of your post, you've probably decided already. What did you decide?

Is this a course choice for one or two semesters? Keep in mind that you will have to undertake a LARGE amount of additional study after/outside of these courses if you want to have any facility whatsoever in these languages. If you are going to be doing that study on your own (not taking more classes), take others' advice and consider the difficulty of the language, along with the amount of time you expect to have and your motivation.

I don't know if you have previous experience learning a foreign language, but one very crucial aspect that surprised me when I was a beginner was that didactic tools such as Pimsleur and even textbooks do not exist or are difficult to find beyond the low intermediate level. To increase your reading skills, you will be obliged at some point to procure books or other reading material written natively in the languages and plow through them with your beginner's vocabulary and a dictionary. It will be slow-going and likely frustrating. If, on the other hand, you're more interested in speaking and listening, the foreign speakers you know will have to commit a great deal of time and effort to you, unless you have an exceptional memory, or allow the learning to drag on for years of casual conversations (rather than intensive study). You will not learn as much vocabulary as you would by taking the reading-intensive route I mentioned above.