I mentioned in an earlier entry that I had dropped Turkish (for more or less political reasons) and picked up Hebrew (because it is super difficult and I wanted to see how that felt.) Well, I gave up on Hebrew. I don’t really have the motivation. I would guess most people who study it via Duolingo are motivated by religion, although I suppose hopeful tourists might also exist. Anyway, once I saw for myself that it was as hard as I imagined and then some, I dropped it after a few weeks. Obviously, I would not have done that if it was my holy language. Or so I think. We shall see if Japanese ever comes out. (There is currently an attempt to make it, finally, but it is slow going.)
I also studied Swedish for a few months. It is a much easier language for an English-speaker to learn, but I am not even an English-speaker primarily. My mother tongue is Norwegian, which is so close to Swedish and Danish that I can read them without remembering the next day which language I read in, even though I remember the content. They are not as close as British, US and Australian English, but probably more like Spanish and Portuguese. (Actually I don’t know those well enough to say for sure, but just looking at them they seem fairly close.)
In the end, I dropped Swedish because I don’t need it. It was super easy, but harder than I expected: I can translate from Swedish easily, but writing in Swedish is much harder. Anyway, I can understand Swedes and they can understand me, so the effort seems a bit wasted. When I ran into a busy patch and had to prune my hobbies, Swedish fell by the wayside. It should be easy enough to pick back up if I ever get that much time on my hands. Probably not unless there is some breakthrough in radical life extension though. But if you want to go to Scandinavia, by all means pick it up. Almost everyone here can speak English, but at least you will know what people say about you behind your back. ^_^
I am still doing my 20 points a day of French though. I don’t really think I’ll ever need it, but it is just hard enough that I can’t read it without learning it, and easy enough that I can breeze through my daily quota without much effort.