I learned Spanish in high school and college. It is a Romance language. Now because I am familiar with Spanish it makes other Romance languages like French and Italian easier to pick up.
German is very difficult for me but it might not be for you. I find Asian languages are difficult for many English speakers bc ie Chinese uses intonation and we don’t have certain sounds in English that Chinese has.
Also Pimsleur is a great app for learning languages. You do have to pay for it. Do y’all have any tips or suggestions on learning languages?
Heya Loke! I haven’t been around as much lately. I hope all is well with you. Umm… with each passing year I am increasingly bilingual. I once was fluent in French but with lack of use, well I realized last year I am no longer fluent. I did use Duolingo to refresh my ability to communicate in French, what I learned is that Duolingo has an odd style of French. When I was studying in school, it felt somehow more proper an grammatically correct. Duolingo had a few odd sentence structures. I’m not saying Duolingo is bad, it is free and does help a person learn, I just learned that it has some odd sentence structures. I speak, read, and write in both Spanish and English. I used to be able to do the same in French, writing was a little more difficult because of weird accentuation. Spanish is considered a latin language, as is Portuguese, Italian, and French too. French has sentence structures more akin to those found in Spanish than those in English. The Duolingo phrasing had English-like sentence structures while learning French. I’m sure it’d be understood, but i’m sure French people would notice a lot of grammatical errors.
All that being said, I don’t mean to discourage you from learning any language! Nor would I discourage you from learning from Duolingo. What I am saying is, Duolingo is a good way to begin, but if you truly want to learn a particular language, it would help to find other sources of learning it too. When I was studying French, it was from a book and a teacher. The teacher helped tremendously. Maybe you could find a person you know who speaks a language you do not know and then you can dedicate time to learning it. That way you’ll have someone to converse with and will become more fluent. The thing about communicating in different languages is that if you do not use it, overtime a lot of it is forgotten over time. Sure I might still be able to find a restroom in France and i’d likely be able to read basic directions but I would certainly not be able to hold a deep conversation in French at this point. I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese and Chinese because those languages are so much different than Spanish and English. I’ve also been interested in learning Arabic. As for a language i’d suggest for you… learn French. You’ll get some of it naturally because you know Spanish and English.
There are many people from other countries that want to learn english, and can speak to you in the language you want to learn. I think it would be easy for you with skype or simmilar…
But immersion is important while learning a language.
Buying textbooks with CDs is really helpful, reading simple sentences as well. Having a friend who speaks a foreign language that you want to learn is even better.
I really don’t have experience with Babbel. I just started using Pimsleur and it looks promising. You have to pay for it but I think it’s a great app. A free app I like is 50languages.com. The way I became fluent (I was) in Spanish was I reviewed every day and I would read the textbook out loud.
You’ll get some of it naturally because you know Spanish and English. 
