Learn a third language

I’m about to head off to camp for two weeks, but after that I’m getting down to business on this goal. I’ve been procrastinating because I don’t know what third language I want to learn. I keep going back and forth between Spanish and Arabic, with occasional lapses of interest in others, such as Hindi and Mandarin. The result of this is that I don’t learn any of them. So I’ve decided to put an end to it: some basic knowledge of Spanish won’t be too difficult to obtain and will come in handy. I’m going to split this up into four smaller goals: learn to conjugate regular Spanish verbs, learn to conjugate very common irregular Spanish verbs, learn 100 Spanish words/phrases, and learn to count in Spanish. I’m not saying I’ll be fluent. I’m not saying I’ll study it in college. I’m just saying I’m going to do something.

Studying Spanish on my own is going fairly well. I’ve learned the fundamentals of pronunciation, some basic sentence structure, how to conjugate regular -ar verbs, and some simple traveler’s vocabulary. It’s slow-going, definitely, because I’m bad about practicing everyday. But I plan to stick with this and maybe take a couple classes in college.

I do not plan to take university-level Classical Greek, but rather intend to stop after two years of high school study. However, I still want to learn a third language.
At first I thought “I’ll learn Arabic.” But, as almost anyone who has tried to learn Arabic knows, this has a number of problems. For one thing, the Arabic taught in colleges and in web programs is Modern Standard Arabic. This Arabic is literary, not colloquial. There are dozens of Arabic dialects, many mutually incomprehensible. And, on top of that, it’s just plain hard. I could get a lot farther with a lot less work learning a language more similar to English (my mother tongue.)
Spanish seems like an all-around good choice with my foundation in advanced French, a plethora of resources, and plenty of opportunity for application. I’ll give it a shot.