[kragen]

i think it only makes sense for referring to programming languages. someone who wants to get a job in the usa, understand their favorite anime, study the buddhist scriptures, or write a new translation of the odyssey isn't going to 'spend so much time deciding what is the "right" language'; the right language is almost uniquely determined by the application area, being respectively english, japanese, pali, and homeric greek in those cases. it's only programming languages where we dither about whether to learn c, scheme, javascript, or rust, because we can do the same things in all of them

[dustincoates]

Funny enough, I was referring to natural languages. You're right that in some cases it's very clear that you should learn English, Japanese, etc. but for many others they're actually attracted to a few languages. (e.g.,I like both Italian and Spanish, which one to learn first? Should I learn ancient Greek or Biblical Hebrew first? Would learning modern Hebrew first help me with Biblical Hebrew?) They don't realize that whatever they choose is going to be hard, so it's better just to choose one instead of dabbling.

[kragen]

it makes some sense to spend some time investigating the potential benefits of different languages, maybe learning a bit of each, before moving to italy or whatever, but certainly it's true that choosing a language to devote time will produce valuable results, while evaluating different languages will not

with respect to those particular questions:

many more people speak spanish than italian due to colonial-age history, and portuguese is almost a spanish dialect. for us residents with culinary aspirations, it may be worthwhile to know that spanish is required for most us restaurant kitchens. but italian isn't that far from spanish either; learning either spanish or italian will make it much easier to learn the other

ancient greek or biblical hebrew depends on which books you want to read. the torah is in biblical hebrew; platon, the hellenistic scientists, and the new testament are in classical to koine greek. modern hebrew will help you a lot with biblical hebrew, because it sort of skipped 1800 years of the sort of linguistic mutation that transformed classical latin into spanish and italian, and it is of course mandatory for living in israel. it may be helpful for flirting with israeli backpackers too