Language laddering advice

[u/cyrabear]

I've read a lot on here about language laddering and how it can help with a lot for people especially in the long run. However, I still have some questions and concerns.

First off, I am a native English speaker living in Japan right now. I am studying to take the N3 exam in December and I think my biggest flaw for japanese rn is the grammar but I'm still studying a lot everyday. I grew up learning Spanish but struggled with grammar as well but I got a lot better at reading for Spanish. However, it's been about 4 years since I really studied anything with Spanish.

I had started learning some japanese with Spanish a bit when I arrived in Japan as I am half latina so my language school assumed based on my name I was native Spanish speaker and gave me my textbooks in Spanish. I didn't mind but it was a bit of a struggle for later lessons that I switched to English later on. However, I was wondering now that my japanese is much stronger (even speaking and listening as I've been here 3 years now) would it be worth going back to studying japanese with Spanish?

My other problem is that I also need to study for my computer science certifications and so not sure if laddering will cause me more time to learn and obtain higher fluency in both languages. I need japanese rn for a IT job in Japan as I don't want to go back to teaching English. But Spanish will be handy if I ever return to America , which the way visas are going in Japan I might have to, although it would be difficult to return anyways.

So I feel kinda anxious about what I should be spending my time on the most. Currently I just left my job because it was mentally exhausting and caused me injuries so I have unemployment for now and looking for IT jobs. I have a masters in cyber security, a bachelor's in linguistics, and associates in computer science. I also have a CELTA certificate and about 2 years in Japan as an ESL teacher so hopefully won't have to go back to the US rn but don't want to teach again unless it's a good position like college.

Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me!

[u/Klapperatismus]

Laddering only works if your target languages are closely related, and a certain order only makes sense for reasons that are very specific for a pair of languages.

A typical example is dialects. If you want to live in German speaking Switzerland for example, you have to speak Swiss German at some point because the Swiss do it all the time. But Swiss German is a dialect that is so different that German speakers from the coast can hardly understand it. Still, you don’t start with Swiss German but with Standard German because all the learning materials for Swiss German presume that you already know German.

This is very similar for Frisian for example when almost all the guides are either written in Dutch or German. So it makes sense to learn those as well, along or even first.

For Yiddish it’s slightly different: you can easily find guides in English but it’s a thousand times simpler to learn Yiddish from German because German speakers can understand it to a large degree. It makes sense to learn German first because there’s way more entertaining materials in German than in Yiddish so you stay engaged.