Which languages to learn?

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I recently said in a blogpost that I thought that most people should be able to learn 3 or 4 languages. Well, which languages should we learn?

Here are a few statistics. I have rounded up to make it simpler.

First of all 45% of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language. This covers many of the languages of India, Persian related languages and most European origin languages. 22 % of the world speaks Sino-Tibetan languages. This category includes Chinese, Thai and Tibetan but not Korean and Japanese for example. However, Korean and Japanese are heavily influenced by Chinese and a majority of words in those languages are of Chinese origin.

The first consideration in choosing a language is interest. This interest can be cultural or a situation of necessity. However, another consideration is utility, and certainly these two groups will give you access to the greatest number of people.

If we look at individual languages we find that Mandarin is the most widely spoken first language at 875 million people. There are also 180 million second language speakers of Mandarin, most of these are Chinese native speakers of Chinese languages other than Mandarin. If you know Mandarin you will have an easier time with other Chinese languages and even Japanese and Korean. So Chinese will give you access to lots of speakers, mostly geographically concentrated in East Asia. But this is an area rich in history and with a growing cultural and economic influence in the world.

Hindi comes next with 370 million native speakers and 120 million second language speakers. If you add in speakers of related Indian languages you probably get closer to the Chinese numbers, although not quite since the Dravidian languages spoken in the South of India are not related. Hindi is next on my list. This is a major part of the cultural history of the world. I do not intend to miss it.

Certainly it would seem worthwhile to invest in learning a language from each of these groups, and then taking advantage of that position to learn a few more.

Next comes Spanish with 350 million native speakers and 70 million second language speakers. If you add in the closely related Latin based languages of Portuguese, French, Italian and others, you easily bring the number of Latin language group speakers up to 750 million. I would certainly include a Latin based language in my repertory. Get started with one of these, probably Spanish and you will find the others easy, if you need them or are so inclined.

English with 350 million native speakers and 500 million second language speakers is the most widely distributed and most useful language today, but who know what will happen in the future. English vocabulary is heavily influenced by Latin based languages, well over 60% of its words are of that origin.

Russian is spoken by  200 million native speakers and another 100 million second language speakers. If you add in Ukrainian, Polish and other Slavic languages you probably get up to 400 million speakers. So that is why I am studying Russian,and having a great time.

German has over 100 million native speakers and 30 million second language speakers. French(part of the Latin group) has 70 million native speakers and 60 million second language speakers. German is more widely used in Europe, whereas France has spread to other continents.  Both are important  European languages with a  lot of history and culture to support them as choices for learning.

Arabic with 205 native speakers and 20 million second language speakers is obviously important and rich in history. I am told that the regional differences are great to the point where this group may not really be considered one language. I do not know but hope to find out when I learn Arabic in the year 2009, after Hindi.

Malayo-Indonesian with 160 million or more speakers may be in the same situation as Arabic with regard to regional variations. I do not know. I will schedule that one for 2010 to coincide with the Vancouver Winter Olympic games.

Bengali with over 200 million native speakers is part of the Hindi group, and I may or may not go after that one. On the other hand Japanese at 125 million is already in my pocket.

This is not intended to be a complete list. There are many other languages to learn, and I know languages that are not on this list, and they  give me  great pleasure. So in the final analysis, what really matters is your own interest.

Comments

[Tony]

Steve,

Your long term goals sounds really intimidating.

I have been reading a lot of articles about dopamine, a substance in human brains that gives you the feeling of pleasure and enjoyment, which reinforce a person to perform certain activities. What I am thinking now, is that when you are learning a foreign language, your brain is probably releasing more dopamine than other people's brains do. That is probably why you are way more productive than average people.

LingQ is a great system, would be even greater if it could stimulate dopamine release.

Tony

[Steve]

Tony,

You are right. But it is not all language learning activity that gives me pleasure. Listening and reading give me pleasure. That pleasure is dependent on the nature of the subject matter, my interest and familiarity with the subject matter, and in the case of listening, the quality of the sound, the voice and the overall impression. I find that even the bird chirping and music in the Turgenev novel I am listening to, increase my enjoyment, and therefore the production of dopamine.

Dopamine seems to improve the cognitive powers of the brain, verbal performance and memory according to a few searches in google.Thanks for bringing this up. I may do a post on it.

The key in language learning is for the learner and the teacher to figure out how to make it pleasurable for the learner. The rest is easy.

[Chris]

Hindi will be great to learn, I have a friend who speaks (or at least understands it). It made me wonder: Will there be any kind of support in LingQ that helps those with no knowledge of a foreign alphabet? I'd love to learn Russian sometime in the future (this is planning far in the future), but doubt being able to leap into even simple articles without knowing how the alphabet works first (sometimes words can be spoken together in a fast string that would make it difficult to pick it up). Interested to know how this will work.

After French, I want to continue with Chinese and Norwegian.

[Ak]

Steve, did you include Urdu? Hindhi/Urdu are mutually intelligible languages. Infact, if you know Urdu, you can easily travel and communicate in countries like Bangladesh, Nepal,Pakistan and India. Most Indian music and movies involve 95% urdu words.
(that's been my experience growing up with Indian music/movies.)

I communicate with a jew from NewYork on the phone. He is fluent in languages like Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, English, French. he is currently attacking Urdu and Arabic because he has a clothing business and he wants to spread it across subcontinent and middleast. Everyone has different reasons to learn languages and he is not learning chinese...etc

My aim is to learn Italian. I want to visit Italy oneday. I am fascinated by their history and culture.

[Steve]

Ak,

I was using a list which showed Urdu as less than 100 million speakers and so did not include it. Here is another list which has it as 105 million speakers. http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html

In any case I think I would learn Hindi first. I think that if I did that I would have an easier time moving to Urdu or Punjabi or other related languages.

[Tony]

http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html

huh, I didn't know more people speak Wu than Cantonese...

[Steve]

Tony,

I am not sure that is right. There are all kinds of statistics out there. I have seen numbers of 80 million for Cantonese too. Who knows?