<p>Which of these languages available to me is most demanding and is a better choice to take.
1.French
2.German
3.Japanese
4Spanish
5.Portuguese
6.Italian
thankyou.</p>
<p>It depends what your means are. If you’re in it for the money, Spanish or Japanese. The other languages aren’t widely spoken. You’re only going to find Italian, for example, in one part of the world. Portuguese, German, and French are a little more widespread.</p>
<p>What is your purpose in studying a language? HS graduation requirement? College graduation requirement? Professional requirement? Personal goal?</p>
<p>If you just want to cross off a requirement, Spanish is probably it. Just about every HS in the country offers it now.</p>
<p>If you want to actually learn a language and be able to communicate in it, don’t take it in school. Save your money for an intensive course at Berlitz (full disclosure, I teach English at Berlitz and the method works), summer school at Concordia or Middlebury, and follow up with six months living in a country where you will have to use the language on a daily basis.</p>
<p>If you want to work for the US State Department and would like to get to do a tour of duty in Italy, take Italian. They will pay for Russian classes, but not for Italian classes (one of my colleagues filled me in on this a couple of weeks ago) because they usually have plenty of Italian speakers on staff.</p>
<p>Of the languages on your list, Japanese is far and above the most demanding for a monolingual English speaker to learn. The grammatical structure is completely different from that of English, and there are very few cognates. Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian are all very closely related to each other, and it is my understanding that of these Portuguese has the most complex verb system. Learn any one of these three and you have learned about 70% of the others. French is related to these three, but has messier spelling. English is essentially the illegitimate child of German and French. Lots of cognates with both French and German, and certain grammatical similarities. All of these languages have gender (English doesn’t), and German has three noun cases (English only has cases for pronouns).</p>
<p>Rumor has it that Italian is more fun, and that when you go to Italy your feeble attempts to speak the language will be well-received.</p>