become fluent in 5 languages

I am travelling in Budapest right now and I am really loving Hungarian. I know it’s difficult with the case system and everything, but I would give it a try. Obviously I would need to move to Hungary to speak it, but isn’t there an introductory course somewhere in Canada?

1. English
2. French
3. Cantonese
4. I’m becoming okay at Spanish (not by choice) and German
5. I really want to improve my Icelandic until the level of my French

Why 5 languages, you may ask? Well, I really only want to become fluent in 2 foreign languages. I consider English, Cantonese Chinese and French to be my “own” languages since I am Chinese-Canadian and I believe I have a right and sort of duty to be fluent in those languages.

However, I’m only really fluent in English. I can’t even write or read or listen to more formal Chinese, so I have a lot to work on for that one. And I need to keep on listening to and speaking French to improve.

For the other two, I am not so sure which languages to choose. I want one that would be good for worldwide communication and maybe a quirky one, or maybe two good worldwide ones would suffice. I’ve been taking a smattering of language courses on and off but I haven’t really dedicated myself to learning a language yet, really, except for French but like I said above that doesn’t count. It was good practice though. The learning curve for German won’t be as steep because I already have a foothold on some of the language.

According to the Department of Foreign Affairs website for Canada, the languages of this century are: Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. So I should pick one of those and start learning. But which one(s)?! The choice leads me to very different worlds!