Spanish

Spanish is the world's second-most-spoken native language, with over 500 million speakers across Spain, twenty Latin American countries and a fast-growing diaspora in the United States. It's the most consistently useful language for English speakers to learn — phonetically clean, written almost exactly as it sounds, and built on a vocabulary so close to English (thanks to a shared Latin heritage) that you already know thousands of words without realising.

What makes Spanish exceptional is the variety. Mexican Spanish is warm and direct, Rioplatense Argentine is musical and full of 'sh' sounds, Andalusian is fast and dropped-syllable, and Caribbean Spanish swallows consonants and dances. Every region has its own slang, accent and rhythm, and a year in any one of them gives you a passport to all the others. Spanish is also the language of an outsized music, film and literary canon — from Cervantes to García Márquez, from flamenco to reggaetón.