A practical look at Flashlingo's eight languages, and how to pick one.
There's no single best language to learn — the honest answer is almost always "the one you have an actual reason to use." Vocabulary sticks far better when there's something real behind it: a trip you've already booked, a class you're taking, family or friends you want to talk to, or a show or artist you love in the original language. Motivation does more for retention than any study method, so before comparing languages by difficulty or popularity, it's worth asking what's actually pulling you toward one in particular.
With that said, here's an honest look at what makes each of Flashlingo's eight languages distinct.
French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese all descend from Latin, which means they share a lot of vocabulary, grammar patterns, and cognates with each other — and, thanks to Latin's influence on English, with a surprising amount of English vocabulary too. If you already speak some of one, picking up another in this group tends to go faster than starting from zero.
French has 320 million-plus speakers across 29 countries and territories, and is a working language of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Olympic Committee — useful well beyond the classroom, particularly for travel across Europe and West Africa.
Spanish is the world's second most-spoken native language, official in 20 countries across the Americas and Europe, and its spelling maps closely to pronunciation, which makes early reading and listening comprehension relatively approachable.
Italian has around 85 million speakers and is highly phonetic — what you see is close to what you say — which makes it a popular choice for learners who want quick wins in pronunciation, plus obvious appeal for travel, food, and the arts.
Portuguese has roughly 260 million speakers spread across nine countries on four continents, with Brazil accounting for the large majority — a language with genuinely global reach despite being spoken about less often in language-learning conversations than French or Spanish.
German is the European Union's most widely spoken native language. It's a Germanic language, like English, so it shares more everyday vocabulary and sentence structure with English than learners often expect going in — even though its longer compound words and case system have a learning curve of their own.
Mandarin is the most-spoken native language on Earth, with over a billion speakers. Its grammar is arguably simpler than European languages in one specific way — there's no verb conjugation to memorize — though it uses a tonal system and a character-based writing system that take a different kind of practice than vocabulary alone.
Japanese has around 125 million speakers, and its vocabulary is closely tied to a huge volume of globally exported film, music, and games — which gives many learners an unusually large amount of enjoyable, motivating listening practice to draw on outside of a textbook.
Malay is the national language of Malaysia and Brunei, closely related to Indonesian, and is written in the Latin alphabet — which removes one common barrier to entry for learners coming from English. It's a practical, less commonly taught option for anyone with ties to Southeast Asia.
If you're still unsure, a reasonable approach is to rank the eight by how often you'd realistically use or encounter each one in your own life, then start with whichever comes out on top — not whichever seems "easiest" in the abstract. You can always add a second language later, and the study skills (active recall, spaced repetition — see our piece on the science of flashcards) transfer completely between languages.
Every language deck on Flashlingo comes in three levels — Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert — so wherever you start, there's room to grow. Browse all eight languages and try a quiz.