What (Germanic/Scandinavian) Language Should I Learn?

[Ond kaja]

[QUOTE=Wormy;35994578]Only learn Swedish if you have the time to. It's pretty hard to learn because of the grammar. German is used in many countries and many people know German, so it might be a better choice to learn German instead.[/QUOTE]

Swedish is one of the languages with the most simple grammar amongst germanic languages. German is way more complex than Swedish grammatically. But yeah, more people speak German than Swedish, so it might be more rewarding to learn.

[Thechuz]

I've just started learning swedish myself but I'm making slow progress. I only have some apps that act as flashcards. Is the best way to buy a swedish dictionary?

[Daniel Smith]

Whatever one gets you the most chicks.

[sami-pso]

[QUOTE=Riller;35993277]I know that, but by that standard, why don't we just go ahead and include french, farsi and spanish and call that shit indoeuropean? You and I both know he meant German in the title with Germanic, so let's not get into semantics over linguistic termology, shall we?[/QUOTE]

Uh..

Scandinavian isn't a language so i figured he didn't mean german when he typed germanic.

[rat guy]

-snip-

[Matthaios]

Dutch.

[Virtanen]

[QUOTE=GuitarMonkey;35988944]Finnish, because perkele.

Though that's Fenno-Scandinavian so I dunno.[/QUOTE]

Finno-Ugric

Finland has extremely little to do with scandinavia.

[blablakoks]

Learn Swedish, you will be able to speak with both Finns and Norwegians.

[Riller]

[QUOTE=sami-pso;35996170]Uh..

Scandinavian isn't a language so i figured he didn't mean german when he typed germanic.[/QUOTE]

Well, the scandinavian languages, arguably minus finnish, are all germanic, so saaying germanic/scandinavian is redundant, and as such, we better assume that OP is just slightly dense at the linguistic termology department and/or just don't care to call it german.

Or he assumed Austrian, Swiss and German were far enough apart to be called seperate languages.

[mac338]

[QUOTE=Carne;35985730]Norwegian because vikings.[/QUOTE]

Vikings spoke old Norwegian.
Which is now Icelandic.
So I guess what you're saying is 'learn Icelandic'

[Extinct]

If you already know English then you can communicate with pretty much 50%+ of the Swedish population. As far as I've understood it less people in Germany speak English compared to Sweden. I'd take my bet on German if you want to reach "as broad audience as possible".

[Steff]

Im Danish, but I say you should learn German because that is the most useful one.

Danish: 5,5 million people
Sweden 10+ million people if you count all including those who speak it as a second language.
Norwegian: 5 million people
German: 100 million native speaker and 180 million including second language speakers.

Do the math. Pick German.

But if you insist on a scandinavian language, pick Norwegian, you should be able to somewhat communicate with a wide variety of Danes, Swedes and Finnish as well.
Danes dont understand Swedes as well as they understand Norwegians, but Norwegians seem to be better at understanding both Swedes and Danes.

Danish is a very complicated language for foreigners, and is a strange mix of Germanic and Scandinavian languages, where Norwegian and Swedish has a common Scandinavian background. But at the same time Norwegian is very similar to Danish. Written Danish and Norwegian is almost identical, but spoken it is very different from each other.

Conclusion: With Norwegian you will get the ability to read Danish and some Swedish text, but have an allround advantage of understanding a big part of all three languages when spoken.