Languages I've got to know

For over twenty years, I've grown up in a monolingual milieu. Living in a suburb to the east of Jakarta brings an ugly consequence: I don't have any privilege of acquiring a regional language effortlessly, unlike those raised in rural areas. While my parents do speak different dialects of Hakka, neither of them speak in that language to their offspring, except mere numbers 1 to 10 and interjections. As a result, Bahasa Indonesia is my mother tongue. A Bahasa-Indonesia-only-speaking Chinese man, that is enough for a Malaysian friend of mine to raise her eyebrows. Indeed, both Hakka and Mandarin are all Greek to me; at least as of now.

Despite my guilty feeling due to incapability of speaking the language of ancestors, I've been confident, though, to say that I am pretty much fluent in the language I'm now using to compose this blog post--English. And not just English, but a specific spoken variant of English--Standard British English. This is a particular goal, I must admit, that I have been aspiring to since I purchased the 7th edition of Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary in December 2009. With no exaggeration, I think I just need to get some exposure to more and more colloquial terms, mend some inconsistent pronunciation, and, voilà, the mission is accomplished.

But that's actually still far from the finish line--or, is there? My pursuit revolves around language learning, and human voice is becoming my playground. There's a list of languages I've got to be able to speak, or, at least, to write in. If I am to classify them, here's my language-learning plan.

1. Languages of philosophy. Apart from (British) English, French and German are indispensable in philosophy studies, particularly modern-to-contemporary Western philosophy. That's why these three languages come to me as the triad of language priority. Frankly speaking, had the Germans not produced much-revered philosophical oeuvres, I would have put learning that language of the horse behind Spanish, or even Dutch. Proclaim that the sentence Die Frau schmeckt die Suppe sounds better than La femme goûte la soupe, would anybody buy it? I might appear offensive to German ears or lovers of German, but my auditory senses can't lie to me. French sounds are synonymous with beauty.
2. Languages of the classics. Given the name, I don't think I'll tackle the phonology of these languages in the near future, even though I'd love to. Classical Greek and Latin, once learnt properly, will make up the 'Five Languages a Student of Western Philosophy Should Know'. Unfortunately, the only variant of Greek I know hitherto is Koine Greek (New Testament) and the only Latin I've been learning is Ecclesiastical Latin (Church liturgy). They're somewhat on a later stage of linguistic evolution--Neither Plato nor Cicero wrote in these forms. In addition, I should also mention Biblical Hebrew, which would help me understand better the Old Testament.
3. Languages of etymology. Bahasa Indonesia has a great deal of words derived from Sanskrit and Dutch. I know there are more to be included on the list, but I've got to limit myself. I choose Sanskrit because I perceive it as a language that has enriched Indonesian vocabulary with such beauteous words as swarnadwipa and kencana. As for Dutch, I'm only after the guttural sounds, which I actually find more appealing than her cousin German. Dutch is the language allowing me to decode historical documents about Indonesia as our founding fathers were mostly fluent in Dutch.
4. Languages of social responsiveness. Here I ought to mention Mandarin, Spanish, Filipino, and Basa Sunda. Mandarin turns compulsory just because I was born as Chinese, hence the Chinese blood (even though none of my extended families speak Mandarin). Given the global competitiveness, Mandarin obviously overrides Hakka. I'd like also to learn Spanish because I want to complete the dictum 'Four Languages to Travel the Whole Americas' (Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French). Portuguese will be tackled after Italian. Meanwhile, I pick Filipino because apart from being the closest language to Indonesian, Filipino has friendly speakers that I want to communicate with in their mother tongue (this way, I assume they're all Tagalog speakers; or at least, understand Tagalog). What about Basa Sunda? Nine years of study at school and still unable to speak a sentence, that's a shame for me.