When you think about why people learn languages, what comes to mind? Career advancement? Travel? Maybe improving your brain health? Well, the real answer might surprise you.
After analyzing 1.75 million Ling app signups throughout 2025, we discovered something that challenges everything the language learning industry has been selling for decades. people don’t learn languages for their careers. They learn for love.
While the industry has spent years marketing professional advancement and business opportunities, the reality is far more human. When given the choice, learners choose romance over career by nearly 4 to 1.
When we explored our complete signup survey data from January through December 2025, personal relationships, pure curiosity, and travel consistently crushed professional development as reasons people learn languages. Love, not money, drove language learning in 2025.
What Actually Drives People To Learn A New Language?
Nearly 1.75 million people told us why they wanted to learn a language in 2025. Here’s what we found when we looked at the reasons people learn languages:
The Top 3 Language Learning Motivations (Ranked By Ling’s Daily Signups)
1. For Love (The Majority) More learners start their language journey for romantic connection than any other reason, nearly 1 in 4 people who download Ling do it for love. These are people learning Thai to connect with their partner’s family. People studying Tagalog so they can finally understand the inside jokes at Filipino family gatherings. People picking up Serbian because love doesn’t come with subtitles, and they’re tired of watching their partner’s face light up at something hilarious while they sit there clueless. 23.7% of motivated learners chose romance— more than any other single motivation. That’s over 1,000 people every single day deciding that love is worth learning a language for.
2. Pure Curiosity (The Hobbyists) Here’s something beautiful: nearly as many people learn languages simply because they enjoy it. These are mainly the polyglots collecting languages like some people collect stamps. 19.2% of learners fall into this category at Ling. They’re learning Serbian because grammar fascinates them. They’re tackling Thai tones as a personal challenge, because understanding how another others communicate feels important, even if they never visit the country. Language learning as pure hobby grew in 2025. People chose to spend their free time learning difficult skills simply because they wanted to, not because they had to.
3. Travel Preparation (The Experience Seekers) Travel motivation comes in third at 16.3% of learners — and these aren’t your typical “point at the menu and hope for the best” tourists. These learners want to actually experience countries, not just photograph them. They’re tired of surface-level interactions. They want to order street food in Thai without embarrassing themselves. They want to chat with the Albanian grandmother selling produce at the market. They’re chasing authentic human connection, just in places they’re visiting temporarily rather than living permanently.
Why Romance Absolutely Crushes Career When It Comes To Language Learning Motivation
Think about the last time you did something truly difficult. Not for money. Not for credentials. But because someone you loved needed you to.
That’s what learning a language for romance looks like. It’s not about adding a skill to your LinkedIn profile. It’s about understanding your partner’s grandmother when she tells stories about her childhood. It’s about getting the jokes at family dinners. It’s about saying ‘I love you’ in a way that resonates deeper than your native language ever could.
Our Ling data reveals this emotional fuel is 4X more powerful than economic motivation. We’re 4X more motivated to learn difficult skills or languages for love than for money.
Learning a language is hard. Really hard. It takes hundreds of hours, consistent practice, and a ton of patience. Yet over a thousand people daily choose to start that journey because they want to communicate with a romantic partner. Meanwhile, fewer than 300 sign up for career reasons.
Even heritage learners exploring family roots (499 daily) outnumber career-focused learners by 79%. This pattern held steady throughout all of 2025. Summer saw slight bumps in travel signups (everyone planning their vacations), but romance stayed on top every single month.
What This Means If You’re Learning For Love
You’re part of the largest group of language learners worldwide. And here’s the encouraging part: research backs you up. Emotionally driven language learning creates stronger neural pathways and better retention than transactional motivations, with neuroscience studies showing that positive emotions enhance cognitive function and improve long-term learning outcomes.
When learning feels personal, you practice more consistently. Makes sense, right? You’re not grinding through lessons to pass a certification exam. You’re learning because you want to tell your partner’s grandmother how much you appreciate her cooking.
You want to understand what your boyfriend’s friends are laughing about when they switch to their native language. You want to say “I love you” in a way that hits different than English ever could.
That emotional connection? It’s powerful fuel for the long haul of language learning.
Career: Why Does It Rank So Low In Language Learning Motivation?
For years, language apps marketed themselves on career benefits. Higher salaries, international opportunities, and competitive advantages. We’ve all seen those ads promising that learning Mandarin will transform your career.
Yet when we looked at why people learn languages on the Ling app, only 25% signed up for career reasons compared to romantic ones. This was honestly surprising to us at first.
Here’s Why Career Motivation Underperforms
After thinking through Ling’s internal data, it makes sense:
The language mismatch. Professionals needing business languages (think Mandarin, German, or Spanish for corporate settings) often skip apps like Ling that specialize in underserved Asian and Eastern European languages. If you need business Spanish for work, you’re probably not signing up for an app known for Thai, Serbian, and Punjabi.
Workplace training. Career learners often use employer-sponsored programs instead of personal apps. Companies pay for professional language training, so why would employees download a consumer app?
Economic motivation fades fast. You need emotional fuel for the long haul. “This might help my career someday” doesn’t get you through 1,100 hours of study. “I want to understand my girlfriend’s family” does.
Timing mismatch. Professional language needs are usually immediate (“I need Spanish for this client meeting next month”), while app learning takes months or years to reach fluency.
Even the “living abroad” category (422 daily) ranked relatively low. This suggests that practical necessity alone doesn’t automatically translate to app-based learning. Emotional motivation does.
How Our Data On Why People Learn Languages Compares To Previous Research
We’re not the first to ask why people learn languages. A 2016 Babbel survey of 5,000 users found that 53% wanted to communicate better when traveling, and 35% mentioned brain health. Career motivation existed, but wasn’t dominant even back then.
What makes Ling’s 2025 findings different:
Romance and relationship motivation is explicitly measured and ranks first. Previous studies lumped this into vague “social” categories, missing the power of romantic connection as a specific driver.
Career motivation is clearly separated and ranks seventh, not bundled with general “professional development.”
Heritage learning is distinguished from general cultural interest, showing that family connection is its own powerful motivator.
Our data spans an entire year, capturing seasonal variations (travel spikes in summer, for example) that shorter surveys miss.
The sample size is substantial – 1.75 million responses provides an unusually large dataset for understanding what actually drives people to learn languages.
What Languages Do People Learn For Love?
Since Ling specializes in Asian and Eastern European languages that mainstream platforms ignore, our romance-motivated learners look different than those on apps focused on Spanish and French.
Here’s what people are actually learning for love:
- Thai gets chosen by expats living in Thailand and people with Thai partners who want to connect with their significant other’s family and culture.
- Tagalog is essential for people in relationships with Filipinos, especially when family gatherings switch from English to Tagalog for jokes and stories.
- Korean is driven partly by international relationships (and yes, some K-pop fans hoping to connect with Korean friends or partners).
- Serbian, Croatian, and Albanian serve Eastern European cross-cultural couples navigating multilingual family dynamics.
- Punjabi, Urdu, and Tamil support South Asian marriages and family connections where speaking the heritage language matters deeply to partners and in-laws.
While Duolingo focuses on the usual suspects (Spanish, French, German), Ling makes these underserved languages accessible to people who actually need them for real relationships, not theoretical career benefits.
Pure Curiosity: The Reason People Learn Languages That Nobody Talks About
Some people learn languages for no practical reason at all. With no deadlines or pressure. Only pure curiosity and passion. This captures something beautiful about human nature:
- Polyglots collecting languages because learning is fun (some people collect stamps, others collect linguistic ability).
- People fascinated by linguistic diversity who want to understand how different languages structure thought.
- Learners motivated by brain health benefits who’ve read the research on bilingualism delaying dementia symptoms by 4-5 years.
- Anyone challenging themselves intellectually because learning hard things feels good.
Language learning as a hobby continued to thrive in 2025. People chose to spend their free time learning Thai or Serbian simply because they wanted to, not because they had to.
Travel: Still A Solid Third Reason Why People Learn Languages
Travel prep accounts for 753 daily signups. While not the top driver, it’s consistent and understandable.
These learners want real experiences. They’re tired of tourist-level interactions where you point at menu items and hope for the best. They want to navigate confidently, order food using actual words, connect with locals authentically, and understand cultural context beyond what tour guides share.
Learning Albanian before visiting Albania transforms your trip. Same with Khmer before Cambodia. Instead of just seeing the country, you experience it through language.
For tips on choosing travel languages, check out our guide on the best languages to learn for travel.
Heritage Learning: Language As Identity
This one hits different because it’s deeply personal. This includes second- or third-generation immigrants reconnecting with roots, adoptees learning their birth country’s language, people exploring genealogical backgrounds, and families preserving endangered or minority languages.
Learning your grandmother’s native Punjabi isn’t just vocabulary practice. It’s identity. It’s belonging. It’s sitting at the dining table, finally understanding the family stories everyone laughs about. It’s cultural continuity across generations.
One heritage learner shared her experience visiting her family’s homeland for the first time. She’d been studying her grandmother’s native Thai through Ling. At a small restaurant, she successfully ordered in Thai for the first time.
For the first time in her life, she wasn’t a tourist in her grandmother’s country. She belonged. She told us she cried right there at the table.
That’s the power of heritage language learning. It’s not vocabulary practice. It’s reclaiming identity.
Living Abroad: Lower Than You’d Expect
This surprised us initially. Why the numbers were so low for something that seems so practical? Here’s what we’ve learned from talking to users:
Many expats get by with English in international communities. If everyone at work speaks English and your apartment complex is full of other expats, the immediate pressure to learn the local language decreases.
Some people live abroad temporarily and consciously skip fluency. If you’re on a two-year work contract, investing 1,100 hours to learn Thai might feel unnecessary.
Expats often use in-person classes over apps. Many prefer structured classroom environments with teachers and classmates.
Work and family obligations limit study time. You’re busy navigating a new country, so daily app practice falls off the priority list.
Some countries require formal courses for visa purposes, pushing people toward official programs rather than consumer apps.
That said, expats who commit to app-based learning often make faster progress than other groups because they get immediate real-world practice opportunities every single day.
The “Another Reason” Category
This substantial group (larger than travel, heritage, career, and living abroad individually) shows that the reasons people learn languages are incredibly diverse.
This category could include parents adopting children internationally who want to honor their child’s birth language, people pursuing religious study, academic researchers needing specialized languages, people using language learning as cognitive therapy after brain injuries, military or humanitarian workers preparing for deployments, media consumers who want to watch shows without subtitles or read books in their original languages, and families preparing for immigration together.
Language motivation is way more diverse than any survey can fully capture! People are endlessly creative about their reasons for learning.
How To Actually Keep Going (Because Motivation Fades)
The truth is that 90% of language learners don’t reach conversational fluency. And the main killer is motivation decline.
That initial excitement (“I’m going to learn Korean!”) fades when lessons get hard. But here’s how to push through:
Connect Goals To Emotions
Keep your “why” visible and visceral. Screenshot a photo of your partner’s family. Write your reason on a sticky note and put it on your bathroom mirror. Make it personal enough that when motivation dips, you remember what you’re working toward.
Set Micro-Goals That Feel Achievable
Not “learn Thai” or “Learn Serbian” or “Learn Korean”… That’s too big and vague. Instead it should be: “I wawnt to be able to order pad thai in Thai at my favorite restaurant,” “text my girlfriend in Korean without using Google Translate,” “Tell jokes to my Serbian friends,” “survive a 5-minute phone call with my partner’s grandmother,” and similar! Be more specific. These small, specific goals give you concrete wins to celebrate.
Build Streaks (They Work)
Daily consistency beats marathon sessions. Research has demonstrated this consistently: “When we space out our learning periods, they are much more effective for learning than if you have those repetitions in close sequence,” says cognitive psychologist Sean Kang.
Hundreds of studies show that distributed practice produces superior long-term learning compared to cramming everything into one session. Ling’s streak features help you maintain habits without burnout. Even 10 minutes daily adds up to over 60 hours per year. That’s real progress.
Celebrate Small Wins
Recognized a word in a song? Ordered food successfully? Had a 2-minute conversation where you understood half of what was said? That’s progress. Notice it. Feel good about it. Language learning is incremental, so you have to train yourself to celebrate the increments.
Immerse In Culture Beyond The App
Combine app learning with movies, music, or cooking recipes in your target language. Make it fun, not just educational. Learning Thai? Watch Thai cooking videos. Learning Serbian? Find Serbian music you actually like.
Find Conversation Partners
Apps teach vocabulary and grammar. Humans teach communication. Find language exchange partners, join online communities, or use Ling’s conversation features to practice with real people.
For Thai learners wanting to jump into real conversations, our guide on common Thai conversational phrases helps you start speaking from day one.
Why Ling’s 70+ Languages Matter For People Learning For The Right Reasons
Here’s what makes Ling different, especially for non-career learners:
Interactive native-speaker audio in Ling ensures learners hear authentic pronunciation from real speakers of languages like Thai, Serbian, Albanian, Khmer, and Punjabi. Languages you won’t find on mainstream platforms get the same quality treatment as Spanish or French elsewhere.
Gamified lessons in Ling take 10–15 minutes per session, making daily practice manageable even when you’re balancing a relationship, a job, kids, and life. This matters for romance-motivated learners who are fitting language practice around relationship time, not choosing between them.
Cultural insights embedded in Ling’s lessons help heritage learners understand not just words but the cultural context that makes communication meaningful with family. You learn why certain phrases are used in specific situations, not just what they mean.
Ling’s interface supports learning in 70+ languages, meaning you don’t need English proficiency to learn your target language. Punjabi speaker wanting to learn Serbian? Thai speaker learning Tagalog? Ling makes those combinations possible where other platforms can’t.
What 1.75 Million People Taught Us About Why Humans Learn Languages
After looking at 1.75 million signups data motivation, and analyzing patterns across an entire year, here’s what became crystal clear:
People learn languages to connect with other people. Not to climb corporate ladders. Not to add a line to their resume. Not even primarily to travel (though that’s part of it).
We learn languages for love. For family. For curiosity. For the deeply human need to understand and be understood by someone who matters to us.
The 2025 Ling data shows that the 4-to-1 dominance of romance over career advancement as a motivation flips decades of language industry marketing completely upside down.
Career benefits exist and matter, but they’re not what get most people to actually download an app, create an account, and push through their first lesson.
The real drivers are:
- Love and romantic connection
- Intellectual curiosity and personal growth
- Cultural exploration through travel
- Personal circumstances too unique to categorize
- Heritage and family reconnection
Career advancement barely beats people who couldn’t even identify a specific motivation.
For those of us building language learning tools, the message is clear:let’s start celebrating the deeply human reasons people actually learn. The desire to understand your partner’s grandmother’s stories. The need to order street food in Bangkok without embarrassing yourself. The joy of finally getting a joke in your heritage language. The simple curiosity that makes humans want to decode how other people think and communicate.
And let’s see what 2026 language learning motivation brings us!
Frequently Asked Questions About Why People Learn Languages
Do More People Learn Languages For Love Or Career?
Love drives language learning 4X more than professional development, challenging decades of career-focused marketing. Love drives significantly more language learners than professional development, challenging decades of career-focused language app marketing.
What Is The Number One Reason People Learn Languages?
Connecting with a romantic partner was the #1 reason people learned languages in 2025, accounting for 23.7% of motivated learners. Pure curiosity came second at 19.2%, and travel preparation third at 16.3%. Career advancement ranked seventh at just 6.0%, much lower than commonly assumed.
Why Don’t More People Learn Languages For Career Advancement?
Only 6.0% of motivated learners cite career advancement as their primary reason. Career-driven learners often need specific business languages (Mandarin, Spanish, German) or use workplace training programs instead of consumer apps. Plus, economic motivation fades without an emotional connection to sustain the long-term effort required for language fluency.
Is Travel Still A Major Language-Learning Motivation?
Yes, travel remains as a major motivation. While not the top driver, travel preparation consistently motivates learners who want authentic cultural connections abroad rather than surface-level tourist interactions. People want to experience countries through language, not just visit them.
How Many People Learn Languages To Connect With Family?
Heritage language learning accounts for around 10% of motivated learners in the Ling app. This includes second-generation immigrants reconnecting with ancestral roots, adoptees learning birth country languages, and families preserving endangered languages across generations. Heritage learners show deeper emotional engagement and often higher completion rates than career-focused learners.
Does Learning A Language For Love Work Better Than Learning For A Career?
Research suggests emotionally driven learning creates stronger neural pathways and better long-term retention than transactional motivations. Romance-motivated learners practice more consistently because communication directly impacts their most important relationship, leading to faster progress and higher completion rates compared to learners motivated primarily by abstract professional benefits.
How Long Does It Take To Learn A Language To Communicate With Your Partner’s Family?
The timeline varies by language difficulty. Category II languages like German require approximately 750 hours for conversational fluency, while Category IV languages like Thai need around 1,100 hours, according to Foreign Service Institute data. Romantic motivation often accelerates progress through increased practice opportunities and emotional reinforcement from successful family interactions.
What Percentage Of Language Learners Have Romantic Motivations?
Romance-driven learners represent 23.7% of all motivated learners in 2025, making it the single largest identified motivation category. This makes relationship connection nearly 4X more common than career advancement (6.0%) as the primary driver for starting language learning, fundamentally changing how we understand language learner psychology.
Here’s What We’ve Learned At Ling
We’ve spent years building an app that teaches 70+ languages, with a particular focus on underserved Asian and Eastern European languages that most apps ignore. Serbian. Albanian. Khmer. Punjabi. Thai. Urdu. Languages that don’t show up in the “most popular” lists but matter enormously to the people who need them.
And our users have taught us something beautiful. They’re not learning these languages because some career coach told them to. They’re not learning these languages because some career coach told them to. They’re learning because they fell in love with someone from another culture. Because their grandmother speaks Punjabi and they want to hear her stories in her own words. Because they’re moving to Thailand and want to actually connect with their new home, not just survive in it.
These are incredible motivations that last long!
That’s the stuff that sustains you through 1,100 hours of study. That’s what gets you through the frustration when tones won’t click or grammar feels impossible. That’s the emotional fuel that powers real learning.
We have actually talked to users face to face and heard of people say they got emotional when they first ordered food in their grandmother’s native language.
We’ve met heritage learners who lit up when they finally understood a family joke. Esther, a half-thai user who learned Thai to connect with her Thai family roots shared a wonderful story on one of our Ling podcasts.
We’ve heard from travelers who felt, for the first time, like they truly experienced a culture instead of just photographing it.
If you’re learning a language right now, whatever your reason, you’re part of something fundamentally human. You’re choosing to build a bridge between yourself and other people, other ways of thinking, other ways of being in the world.
Maybe you’re learning for love. Maybe for curiosity. Maybe to connect with your roots. Maybe you can’t even articulate why, you just know you want to. All of those reasons are valid. All of them are enough.
The Ling app exists to make that journey accessible, engaging, and honestly kind of fun (gamification works!). We built it for everyone in that 1.8 million count who chose connection over career, who chose curiosity over credentials, who chose love over LinkedIn skills.
Whether you’re learning Thai to talk to your partner’s family, exploring Serbian to connect with your heritage, or studying Tagalog because you’re planning a trip and want it to matter, we get it. We built this for you.
Your reason matters less than your commitment to showing up. Whatever drives you, we’ll be here to help you take the next step.
Data Source & Methodology
This analysis is based on the Ling app’s internal signup survey data collected from January 1 through December 31, 2025, representing 1,752,686 total responses from users worldwide who selected their primary motivation for learning a language when creating their Ling account. Daily averages were calculated by dividing total annual signups per category by 365 days. Percentages represent each motivation category’s share of all motivated learners (excluding the “no specific reason” category for clarity in analysis).
Key Findings:
- Top language learning motivation: Romance/relationships (23.7%) — Ling 2025 study, 1.75M users
- Romance vs career ratio: 4:1 (1,097 vs 279 daily signups) — Ling 2025 study, 1.75M users
- Sample size: 1,752,686 total responses — Ling internal data, Jan-Dec 2025
- Survey period: Full calendar year (365 days) — Ling internal data, 2025
- Second-highest motivation: Pure curiosity (19.2%) — Ling 2025 study, 1.75M users
- Career motivation ranking: 7th out of 8 categories (6.0%) — Ling 2025 study, 1.75M users
- Heritage vs career learners: 79% more heritage learners — Ling 2025 study, 1.75M users
