A lot of native English speakers tackle a romance language as their first foreign language before moving on to more challenging (for English speakers) ones like Polish or Korean or Arabic. I've been learning modern Greek, and I've been thinking a lot about what a perfect language it is as a sort of "next step up" for English speakers who have only studied a category 1 language so far. Obviously not every language will appeal to everyone, but maybe this will capture the interest of someone who's never thought about trying Greek. :D
Firstly, there's the issue of orthography. With the exception of French, most romance languages tend to have a pretty straight forward orthography. This is largely true of Greek, but of course, it's written in the Greek alphabet. I think this is a great first "new writing system" for people who have only studied languages written in the Latin script - there's generally at least some prior familiarity with it, and it's extremely similar to the latin alphabet so you can learn it quite easily, but it'll get your brain used to learning to read more diverse additional scripts. It's also quite beautiful in my opinion, but of course that's totally subjective.
Next there's grammar. Greek grammar is very similar to Romance grammar, but just harder (i.e. more morphologically complex) What's great about it though is that a lot of the concepts you have to learn in the romance languages are very applicable to Greek. For instance, romance languages tend to distinguish an imperfect past tense from a perfect/preterite past tense. Greek makes the same perfect/imperfect distinction in all tenses (for the most part). This is particularly evident in situations where romance languages or english would use an infinitive, which modern Greek lacks. For instance, take the following sentence:
English:
I want to learn greek.
Italian:
Voglio imparare il greco (I want to learn the greek)
Greek (perfect):
thelo na matho ellinika (I want that I learn greek)
vs imperfect:
thelo na matheno ellinika (I want that I be learning greek)
The verb conjugations themselves are extremely similar to Italian and Spanish (though there are some cool conservative features like the synthetic passive!) as is the syntax and the sparing use of personal pronouns. There are a handful areas where greek syntax agrees with English instead (for instance adjectives go before nouns they describe) but generally speaking romance word order and greek word order are very very similar.
Just like the romance languages Greek has grammatical gender, but it retains the three gender system (feminine, masculine and neuter) that is used by many conservative Indo European languages. Like the romance languages (and unlike, say, German) the vast majority of the time you can tell what gender something is by the ending, and as a result this gender system isn't a nightmare to get used to.
In a similar vain, Greek retains four noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive-dative, vocative) but once again the declension system is incredibly clean and easy to learn relative to many other European languages with cases. This makes Greek possibly the best language to learn to get used to the whole concept of a case system.
So, I think I've established that Greek is a great next language to learn if you haven't studied any older/more conservative European languages, but there's also a big argument to be made from a cultural standpoint!
Greek is only spoken by around 15 million native speakers, meaning not many people learn it, but there's still plenty of people to practice with. Greeks generally don't expect you to be learning their language, and they are extremely excited to help learners in my experience. Greek also has a similar English proficiency rate to the rest of southern Europe, so if you visit a Greek speaking country you shouldn't have trouble using it with people.
Greek also has contributed thousands of words to other European languages, and in the same way that learning a romance language teaches you a ton about English etymology, so does Greek, which is a really fun experience. There's definitely a lot of cognates if you speak English, but since Greek is not latin based it still poses more of a challenge vocabulary wise than the romance languages do. It won't be totally alien like learning Japanese or Chinese vocab, but it won't be totally familiar either, meaning once again it's a nice step up.
Finally, while Greek is not mutually intelligible with its ancient forms (koine and classical greek), it is FAR more conservative than most modern European languages, and so learning the ancient language after the modern one shouldn't be so difficult if that's something you're interested in.
Edit: So, if I've convinced you to give it a shot, I strongly recommend the totally free language transfer complete greek audio course. It'll teach you pretty much all the grammar you need so if you supplement it with vocab study you'll be good to go!
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