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How many languages do you need to learn.. | ||
Tags: Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 17 of 60 24 January 2010 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Don't overestimate how far English will get you. It's still only spoken (natively AND as a foreign language) by several hundred million people. Depending on who you believe, that's 8% to 13% of the world's population.
For example, many people are amazed that English will not allow you to talk to the people in East Asia - a friend of mine just made the experience that on Thailand's touristy beaches, taxi drivers and restaurants alike know less English than is necessary even to do their job, never mind having interesting conversations. I made the same experience in Beijing in 2004. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 18 of 60 24 January 2010 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is simply impossible. Even if you learn the 10 most spoken languages, you're well under 50%. And IMHO learning the 10 most spoken languages is an extremely difficult task (I haven't heard of anyone who has achieved it), as they include very different - and therefore difficult - languages like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi.
I also wonder at your reasons for wanting to be able to speak to everyone in their native language. It's highly unlikely that you'll meet people from so many different backgrounds in your lifetime (especially not in situations where you don't have another language in common). Also, the more time you spend on language study - the less time you'll have for actually speaking to other people in those languages. If your goal is to be able to communicate with many different people, I'd recommend picking some (maybe 2 or 3) of the world languages (read "official U.N. languages": Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, or Arabic) and focus on these. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5569 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 19 of 60 25 January 2010 at 3:24am | IP Logged | |||||
When you're calculating these numbers, you can't just add up the number of Mandarin speakers, the number of English speakers, the number of Spanish speakers, etc. You have to take into account those people who speak more than one of the languages included (and get counted more than once), or else your estimate will be much too high.
10% of the world's population is about 670 million, not 70 million. Edited by Levi on 25 January 2010 at 3:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6370 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 60 25 January 2010 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Whoops, I was going back and forth between 99% and 90%. I got tired after counting to about 1%. :D Good call! Edited by goosefrabbas on 25 January 2010 at 3:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| m32amir Heptaglot Groupie Canada youtube.com/user/m32Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5652 days ago 53 posts - 184 votes Speaks: Kazakh, Russian*, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Turkish, Mandarin | Message 21 of 60 25 January 2010 at 9:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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The number of native speakers is certainly one of the most important factors when choosing a language.
However, one must not forget other important aspects such as: 1. Number of books/(articles on the internet) being published every year. (English, German) 2. Number of fluent speakers (English, French, German) 3. Number of countries where the language is official (Spanish could be #1 choice) 4. Beauty of the language, wonderful movies (Italian) In other words although learning exotic languages like Chinese or Hindi it's getting popular, these 5 languages (EN, FR, GER, SPA, ITA) are always gonna be widely used. For example if a person from Czech Republic talks to someone from Hungary most likely they would be speaking German (or English). Croatians and Romanians can speak to each other in Italian, etc. Personally I am influenced by my own (Russian) background. There is about 8% of French ( Latin) words and about 5% of German words which are widely used. So for me it's such a pleasing experience increasing my own awareness of those words and even enriching my Russian vocab at the same time. Edited by m32amir on 25 January 2010 at 9:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5962 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 22 of 60 26 January 2010 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||
In 50 years I'd be surprised if even 1% of the world population learns Italian as a foreign language. Even now Italian is hardly used outside of Italy and it's only going to go downhill from here. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 23 of 60 26 January 2010 at 10:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think this thread has been good at illustrating the problem of having a common language with many people. English is clearly not spoken "everywhere", and where it is spoken a little bit, it's barely a passable level. There also seems to be a widespread impression that "everyone in India speaks English anyway", which is quite far from the truth. Somewhere between 10% and 20% of Indians speak English, and probably a large number of those are concentrated in certain areas of cities and in certain economic/social classes.
The numbers listed for Mandarin speakers are probably not for native speakers. Many of the people I met in Shanghai and Hangzhou spoke Mandarin as a second language, and a local language from the Wu group at home with their parents. But it is certainly extremely easy to use Mandarin to do everything. It was exceedingly rare to find anyone who didn't speak at least as much Mandarin as I did. (hmm. Now if only there were a language that is 10x easier to learn than all those national languages. That would make things much simpler.) I think a more interesting version of this general question would be how many languages would you need to know in order to speak with most of the people you meet in the 100 biggest cities. Visiting the 100 biggest cities would be a challenge in itself, and if you're just sticking to a local area then you're limiting it to a much smaller number of languages anyway. People who live in those big cities have a need to speak one of the common languages of the area so they can interact, so this is a project that seems much more doable than learning the languages of all of the X-billion isolated farmers who never travel more than 50km from their place of birth. Using this list of cities, you end up with 44 different countries, and over 30 major languages (just as a rough estimate). A lot of them are really unrelated to each other too. I'd worship anyone who could speak Cantonese, Xhosa, English, Hindi, and maghreb Arabic, let alone all the others ;) Edited by doviende on 26 January 2010 at 10:12am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Veedo Newbie United States Joined 5423 days ago 12 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 24 of 60 28 January 2010 at 7:47am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't trust the non-native statistics as much though because there are probably a lot of people who speak a little bit of a language and get included in those statistics (like everyone in the US who "took a little bit of Spanish in high school"). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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