Learning a New Language?

Is anyone currently learning a new language?

What language and why?
How are you going about learning it?

I am currently learning Italian with my wife. My great-grandfather on my dads side came from Italy and my grandfather would speak some Italian to us growing up.

Currently, I am using Duolingo (42 day streak!) every day and practicing a little with my wife.

Comments

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

I'm in the process of learning Swedish. Short list of reasons:

• I'm part Scandinavian by descent (My mother's grandfather was Finnish by birth, but primarily Swedish by heritage).
• Most of my favorite bands are from Sweden or Finland.
• I find it particularly interesting from a comparative linguistics perspective. Much like English, it's a Germanic language that's been heavily influenced by French over the years.

I'm using Babel right now, which I've found to be reasonably good, if a bit pricey. Unfortunately I've only had somewhat limited opportunities to practice, though Sveriges Radio International has a news program intended for people learning the language (Radio Sweden på lätt svenska (literally 'Radio Sweden in simple Swedish')) which has been very helpful for listening comprehension. I am also working on saving up for a trip to Stockholm though (and probably eventually trips to Göteborg and Falun too), so I should have some very good opportunity to practice eventually.

I've also been considering taking the time to learn Spanish (fourth most spoken language in the world if you include L2 speakers, and I'm way to lazy to take the time to learn Hindi (at number 3) or Mandarin (at number 2)), but I think I'm going to get better at Swedish first (especially considering that I can kind of understand basic Spanish even though I can't speak it)

[Sarah Dye]

I'm learning two. I'm learning Korean and Hawaiian. I'm using Duolingo for Korean and Hawaiian. I learned about Drops from Twitter recently and I have been using the app to supplement Duolingo's Korean lessons.

I'm learning Korean because I'm Korean American. I was born in South Korea but was adopted as a baby. So learning Korean is just getting touch with a part of my identity I never explored.

I'm learning Hawaiian because I've always wanted to learn the Hawaiian language. I used to read The Royal Diaries book series and my favorite book in the series was about Princess Kaiulani. At the end of the book, I loved reading the appendix to see all the Hawaiian words and what they meant. When I saw Duolingo released a Hawaiian course I got really excited and just had to do the course.