system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I (undergrad) will need to learn one of (French, German, Russian) for my PhD. Does anyone have any advice?

Hi, everyone,

I'm currently an undergrad, and I'll be going to grad school in the next few years. In my field (mathematics), most PhD programs require that I have the ability to read manuscripts written in one of French, German, or Russian. I feel like I should get a head start right now, and learn one of them, so that I'm not desperately trying to learn a new language in grad school, when my language acquisition skills will be even worse than they are now.

My linguistic background: my first language is English, and I grew up in the United States. English is the only language I speak fluently. I speak a little bit of Arabic and German, and I can sort of read French.

Pick one of the languages. I'm going to refer to it as `$language`.

The problem I've been encountering is that most language courses teach conversational and colloquial `$language`. I'm not particularly interested in learning `$language` to speak with other people; I need to be able to read mathematical works in `$language`, and that's it.

Aside from taking a class in `$language`, does anyone have any suggestions for learning `$language`? Does anyone have any opinions on which one I should pursue? Is there anyone who was in a similar situation that could perhaps provide some insight? Etc.
gpt
French is an easy language to learn how to read (gets more problematic to learn how to speak because of elisions, unpronounced letters, etc.)

I strongly recommend the book "French for Reading" by Karl Sandberg.  It's designed specifically for graduate students to pass their language exams, and all of the examples they use are based out of actual published scholarly articles and books rather than introductory conversation.

I went from 0 to being able to read the captions at the Louvre unassisted within 3 months.