[charriu]

During downtime between 2 jobs, I used to look at different languages for like half a day each, just to see what they did differently compared to the ones I already knew. I was mostly interested in concepts, not syntax.

This has helped me to be quicker when picking up new languages or even frameworks. Because, well, nothing is ever really new, right?

(Note that I would not recommend this strategy to a complete beginner. You need something to compare what you are discovering to.)

As for recommendations, I would suggest you look at what kind of problem you're trying to solve. If you could benefit from the infrastructure something like Java EE provides you, choose Java or kotlin (those are mostly interchangeable). For scripting, choose bash or python. For client-side web stuff, JavaScript. And so on.