I intend to go back to Thailand. I consider SE Asia to be my home and while I do like Vietnam a lot, I learned to speak Thai while I was there and I don't speak any Vietnamese. That changes things a lot when you can communicate with all the locals. Here, if I don't have an app to help me or if I leave my little area which is colloquially referred to as "cracker-town" I can be totally lost and unable to talk to anyone pretty quickly.
You could drop me in the middle of a field in Thailand and I would be able to speak with almost anyone on at least a basic level. I'm not going to learn another damn-near-impossible one-country language though. It took me a decade to learn to speak Thai :)
I remember the last time we went to Italy I was having a bit of a freak out because I didn't speak any Italian, and the apartment we had rented online was locked when we arrived, and we had no contact number for the owner (they were supposed to meet us there). It was super stressful for like an hour until we managed to hand signal our way through communicating with random strangers until someone was able to help us call the owners.
One thing that surprisingly ended up helping is that I am fluent in Spanish. The village we were in apparently got a lot of Spanish tourists so there were a LOT of Spanish speaking Italians there. Plus the languages are similar. Everyone thought I was from Mexico because of my accent in Spanish... lol!
I definitely feel you on learning a one country language. That is some dedication! I want to learn another language but can't decide which one. I want to learn something that would be really weird for a white American dude to learn. That always trips the native speakers out.
i've been studying Spanish lately and am envious that you are fluent in it. We've probably discussed this before but as you know that opens up so much of the world for a person when they can speak that. I think in USA schools that studying Spanish should be mandatory. I studied French because they gave me a choice. Globally speaking, French is only slightly more useful than speaking Thai.
Yeah man, Spanish is super useful. Having Spanish and English has made lots of other languages accessible to me. Well, at least in written form. I can understand quite a lot of written Italian, French and Portuguese (I can actually understand quite of bit of spoken Portuguese if they have a mild accent). So many of the base words are the same so you can kind of work it out. I would highly recommend learning some Spanish if you get the chance.
One of these days I'm going to go to Spain for a quick trip while visiting in-laws in England. I've never actually been! It will be fun to run around Spain with a Mexican accent and slang. haha!
I keep putting off learning Spanish just because I remember how hellish it was for me to master Thai. People say that it is a lot easier than languages that use other script like Thai but honestly, learning languages in not my area of expertise at all and never has been.
I'm on my 3rd attempt at DuoLingo. I think I just need to buckle down and accept that it isn't going to be easy nor something that happens overnight. I have quite a few friends that live in expat areas of the Spanish speaking world and the ability to communicate just a little bit makes everything a lot easier. I know that in Thailand I am able to get things done a lot easier than the average foreigner just by being able to talk.
Maybe I should make a schedule and stick to it and put in an hour a day of studying.
About your Mexican accent I have heard that is a very real thing that people who are native speakers can identify almost immediately kind of like how I can tell after just a few sentences whether someone is Canadian or American - maybe it is even more profound given the distance between Spain and all the rest of the Spanish speaking world. I know that I accidentally ended up with a southern accent in Thai and the Thai people get a real kick out of that since the southern accent is considered the "lower class" accent of the country.