If I could only learn one additional language, and I wanted to travel the world, what language would serve me best other than English or Spanish?
Mandarain opens up communication with over a billion people
Mandarin
I’m sooooo close with French. I just need to buckle down for like a couple weeks and I’ll be fluent I think. I’ve always heard that’s a good one.
I dunno about useful but Japanese is beautiful and I want to learn it
i don’t think people understand how spanish’s utitity matters in the future word in light of the big role it played in the this election and i think that’s manifested in vagarious forms of ai like llm’s and face detection.
in the end, the fact that the global south is too brown and speaks so “humanly” holds face detection and llm ai’s at bay as we descend from this election into the world orwell described in 1984; financed by popularly beloved american oligarchs; and enabled by a two party system through manufactured consent and crowd/social engineering.
and to our new big brother overloads i say this: good morning; i’m pleased to see you again and what would it be my pleasure to do for you today? lol
i saw that and i shared in the hopes of creating discourse that’s both relevant to the “interesting” times we’ve been living in these last few days and add a new perspective for everyone to help encourage engaging with you through your post.
By the numbers: French or Arabic, as other commenters have mentioned.
But it really, really depends on where in the world you want to travel. If you’re interested in Asia, for example, neither French nor Spanish nor Arabic will help you much (save for some remaining French usage in Vietnam).
A better answer is: figure out where you want to go, then do the math on what to learn.
If you’re fluent in Spanish you can probably bullshit your way through comprehending most romantic languages so French and Portuguese (the other big colonial languages) are probably out.
Maybe Arabic for the fact that while it isn’t a dominant language in most countries there are fluent communities in all sorts of parts of the world.
Alternatively, Hindi/Mandarin for the sheer number of people it’d let you communicate with.
Fluency in spanish doesn’t help with french in my experience. While both might be romance languages, french pronounciation makes it so that in conversation words are really, really hard to translate without prior knowledge on some words, at least for me. My first language is spanish, for reference. Portuguese and italian are a 50/50 depending on the accent.
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I’d say French or Portuguese
Since you’re interested in traveling, I would say french. It is spoken in a very wide variety of countries all over the world, you have a lot of resources to learn it and it’s related to the other languages to know. Other languages might have more speakers, but if youre just interested in the visiting a lot of wholly different places, it is probably the best one.
Lots of French loan words are also used by other languages.
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I mean, most of the world’s population lives in China. So Mandarin would be a good candidate.
while China is the second biggest country in terms of population, India has the biggest population. For the majority of the world (>4 billion) to live somewhere, you’d have to take a circle with a diameter from roughly Ulaanbatar to Makassar, and draw it.
More like a quarter.
French and Arabic are the second and third most spoken language in number of countries. Then there is the obvious Mandarin which is spoken in most of China with around a billion locutors
I keep debating Mandarin but my issue is how the language is tied tightly to China. Helpful if I decide to explore China in depth but seemingly less so if I want to “get by” in a large number of countries. If I had an ability to learn languages quickly, I would probably learn French, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi, but I think I am already pushing my limits.
Yeah, that’s the thing: “which language is spoken by the most people” is an easy question to answer, but “which language (or combination of languages) lets me communicate well enough to get by in the most places” is much harder because the statistics aren’t necessarily collected in a way that lend themselves to that kind of analysis.
For example, Hindi is spoken by a whole bunch of people, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of those people also speak English, so if you already know English you don’t actually need to learn it.
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The Harappan language—then you could decipher the script of the Indus Valley civilization.
D rink yo ur ov alt ine
Depends on the route you want to take while traveling. For example, if you want to circumnavigate in a sailboat through the tropics, French is a great choice because France includes a bunch of tropical islands:
French is also widely spoken in Africa, IIRC.
In most of the places French is spoken, it is the second language (instead of English or Spanish). Only place I can think of off the top of my head where Francophones would likely also know English is Quebec and, I guess, France itself.
The other languages in the sorts of places I was talking about are mostly ones like Arabic, various sub-Saharan African indigenous languages, or Polynesian.
There are more French speakers in Africa than there are in France and the French Language Authority is absolutley SEETHING at this fact because they’re losing control over “proper French” and for the first time ever French is evolving like a language should
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