Does anyone else study languages to try to make friends? And is that even a healthy reason to learn a foreign language?
Our take
There is a word in Old Norse, "þraust," that means both "toil" and "the thing you must do because your soul is too loud to stay quiet." I think about that word a lot when I read posts like this one. Someone sitting in their room, scrolling through footage of people in Costa Rica and Germany and Finland, feeling the specific gravitational pull of a spoken language they haven't even started yet — not because they want a résumé line, not because they're chasing some polyglot leaderboard, but because they believe, with a conviction that borders on holy, that if they could just arrive in the right language, they would finally be home. And then they pause. They wonder if that's healthy. That pause is the most spooty thing in the entire thread.
The honesty here is surgical. The original poster isn't performing loneliness for sympathy. They're laying out a pattern they've noticed in themselves — the way they've cycled through Danish and Finnish and German and Spanish like someone shopping for the exact climate they think they deserve — and they're asking whether the motive matters more than the method. It does. And it doesn't. And the tension between those two answers is where every real conversation about language learning lives. If you studied a language for years and still can't speak or understand anything, the problem might not be the education system, but the education system is still a perfectly valid place to start unpacking why. What this person is really describing isn't a failure of pedagogy. It's a failure of belonging, using vocabulary acquisition as the delivery mechanism.
Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: languages are not bridges. They are doors, and you still have to walk through them into a room full of people who may or may not want you there. The Swede at the hotel who didn't care about the clumsy Swedish sentences. The multilingual person online who was brilliant and drowning in the same silence. These are not cautionary tales. They are the actual data. The Romance languages look gorgeous on the page and then sprint at you in conversation like something with opinions. French written and French spoken belong to two different species, and the gap between them is where most learners quietly combust. That gap is also where the real learning happens, if you survive it long enough to notice.
So where does this leave us? Watching someone decide between German and Spanish based on the emotional temperature of a single video is not a failure of discernment. It is, if anything, a more honest method of selecting a language than most curricula offer. The question worth tracking now is whether the platforms we use to discover these languages are quietly turning our desire for connection into another content loop — another "I saw a video and now I need to learn everything" moment that replaces the harder, slower work of actually sitting with a stranger who speaks the thing you're trying to become.
I started seriously studying a foreign language in high school and that was Spanish. However, the teacher was so vile and I was miserable in his class. So, I replaced it with French. Luckily, the French teacher was an angel of a person and the work load was so much less.
I ended up really liking French and becoming the best in the class. I'm still interested in French, but the language frustrates me. The spoken language is completely different from the written form of the language. Africans tend to speak French clearly, but this is a minority of the media available. I seriously think that if I had spent this time and devotion on another language, I'd be fully bilingual now.
I grew up in a really abusive family and never had any friends, so I've often had an idea in my head of going to some other place and finally finding a family of my choice. In my teenage years, I thought about studying Danish and going to Denmark, because Danes were supposedly the happiest people in the world and I wanted that. Then Finland became the happiest country in the world and I thought about learning Finnish. It's worth acknowledging that most people speak English in these countries (Denmark and Finland), but being able to speak the native language, in my mind at least. I did meet someone at a hotel from Sweden one time. I spoke a few sentences to him in Swedish. I was 18 and thought he'd be impressed. He didn't give a fuck.
Anyways, late last year I saw a video of someone from Germany who just seemed so incredibly kind that I thought about studying German. A few days ago, I saw a video of someone from Costa Rica who just seemed to have his heart on his sleeve and I am now thinking about studying Spanish for the first time since I was in high school. 😂 Also, a few weeks ago, someone really encouraged me to study Spanish, so maybe this is a sign?
However, is this really a healthy motive for studying languages? I recently met someone online who speaks so many languages, I don't know what the number is, but he's also depressed and suicidal and shares his attempts on social media. I wonder if he was on the same website that I am because he's lonely and even though he's accomplished learning languages, he probably should have invested his time and energy into something that will give him more inner value.
Then again, I'm sure people have formed beautiful relationships as a result of studying foreign languages.
I really don't have an answer. I wanted to put this out there, since it is not a discussion that I see people having.
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