There is a word in Old Norse, "þraust," that means both "toil" and "the thing you must do because your soul is too loud to stay quiet." I think about that word a lot when I read posts like this one. Someone sitting in their room, scrolling through footage of people in Costa Rica and Germany and Finland, feeling the specific gravitational pull of a spoken language they haven't even started yet — not because they want a résumé line, not because they're chasing some polyglot leaderboard, but because they believe, with a conviction that borders on holy, that if they could just arrive in the right language, they would finally be home. And then they pause. They wonder if that's healthy. That pause is the most spooty thing in the entire thread.
The honesty here is surgical. The original poster isn't performing loneliness for sympathy. They're laying out a pattern they've noticed in themselves — the way they've cycled through Danish and Finnish and German and Spanish like someone shopping for the exact climate they think they deserve — and they're asking whether the motive matters more than the method. It does. And it doesn't. And the tension between those two answers is where every real conversation about language learning lives. If you studied a language for years and still can't speak or understand anything, the problem might not be the education system, but the education system is still a perfectly valid place to start unpacking why. What this person is really describing isn't a failure of pedagogy. It's a failure of belonging, using vocabulary acquisition as the delivery mechanism.
Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: languages are not bridges. They are doors, and you still have to walk through them into a room full of people who may or may not want you there. The Swede at the hotel who didn't care about the clumsy Swedish sentences. The multilingual person online who was brilliant and drowning in the same silence. These are not cautionary tales. They are the actual data. The Romance languages look gorgeous on the page and then sprint at you in conversation like something with opinions. French written and French spoken belong to two different species, and the gap between them is where most learners quietly combust. That gap is also where the real learning happens, if you survive it long enough to notice.
So where does this leave us? Watching someone decide between German and Spanish based on the emotional temperature of a single video is not a failure of discernment. It is, if anything, a more honest method of selecting a language than most curricula offer. The question worth tracking now is whether the platforms we use to discover these languages are quietly turning our desire for connection into another content loop — another "I saw a video and now I need to learn everything" moment that replaces the harder, slower work of actually sitting with a stranger who speaks the thing you're trying to become.