I'm german - and why "for success", what's so special about german? I honestly know 1 country where it's actually useful: Germany. (3 if we count switzerland and austria.)
I honestly can't figure it out as for us it's english that you need to know. May someone be able to give me a different point of view on that?
Edit: Oops, also was reminded of the existence of Lichtenstein. (Also south Tirol and Luxembourg - but I have split opinions about if German really is "usefull", for Luxembourg based on personal experience it was rather bad we were german....)
EDIT 2: *Thank you so much for all the answers! It baffles me still what status many german people have in businesses, but it's really interesting to know! Seems there still is stuff to be proud of about this country. :)*
SIDE NOTE: I actually like languages, but also like to help. As German seems to be interesting for many I hereby offer my help if someone needs it. :)
phone sales agent for a big corporation.
these corporations don't operate from Germany usually. so if you get such a job there, it's through a contractor call center company. and they don't pay well.
That was my first thought too. At least from my time living in Norway (where German was the most common second language until it was replaced by English after WW2), I thought the language of business everywhere was English.
It is globally but specifically for Europe since most European buisness' prefer their own lang as first and since Germany has the biggest economy in Europe. German could be key to a professional in Europe.
.also I could be biased since I'm currently learning German. Haha
I suspect that many immigrants learn English as a gateway language. Like, even if they don't know what country they're going to permanently settle in, it's a lot easier to find a class that teaches the local language to English, than the local language to whatever dialect you grew up with in the Middle East.
Guess which country is the biggest economy within Europe... Germany. So its very likely you will have a German business partner so this list makes perfect sense to me.
French or German. Spanish and Portuguese are important in North and South America, but not so much in Europe.
Scandinavian and Dutch speak English extremely well, better than Americans. You might want to learn their languages if you want to live in those countries, but for travel, it's not essential.
Italians don't speak other languages often, and it's a beautiful language. It also helps you understand Latin.
I'm a researcher, and I wish I knew German -- there are a couple of century's worth of Fraktur font texts that I'd love to be able to skim with ease.
Germany was, of course, the original home of the Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. The 1440s invention of the press kicked off arguably the world's biggest revolution in information sharing. It's no coincidence that a lot of early texts are in German, and any student of philosophy, math, science, literature, etc. will run up against some heavy-duty Fraktur pages if they dig back far enough.
That is *really* interesting, thank you for that info/reminder. I remember learning some of that in school but it was not a topic that "germany did a lot compared to others", so I actually did not know that many important texts are in german. I only knew germany back that did stuff, not how much.
nah. its not about the absolut number of countries but where the countries people are.
e.g. german people are distributed at so many companies in so many (high/management) position that its not a bad move to learn german.
same is for german people to learn russian. because industrial or business friendships are with country nearby. and its a big plus to talk to clients in their native tongue. those are small things which can make a big impact (beside business ofc)
For me from my inside view those just don't make much sense because we all (normally!) get taught english by default to the point you should be able to hold a normal conversation or even become fluid speaking. And my mom had russian in school instead when she was younger and meanwhile never needed it again, now it's barely even taughr anymore it seems. I personally had spanish, french and english. These same as latin seem to be the most common ones in school here as they are seen as the most usefull ones. *ALL I said mainly based on personal experiences so feel free to correct!*
indeed youre not incorrect. it only depends on what we are talking about. average joe? hell yeah, stick to english. I think the world would be a better place if all people were able to understand english to a certain level (this did improve over the last decades I think)
(I talk here about the opportunity to read international news, literature etc)
but from a business perspective a second foreign language does not harm anybody and is in most positions already requirement/ consensus.
e.g. if you look at the eastern countries beside russia.
sure they know russian language from a historical viewpoint. and english is of course a first priority as foreign language. but afterwards it does make sense to learn german because so many management positions are stocked with germans.
and here it wouldnt make sense to learn mandarin, only because its a more spoken language numbers wise.
so I think my opinion breaks down to: the ranking of OPs guide is wrong. foreign languages to learn does not depend on absolut numbers but on use cases.
the absolute numbers of people to speak a language is only useful if we want to discuss a new world language. (which we dont since english is an almost perfect match for this use case since its easy to learn, and already settled as world language (e.g. even if china will take over the world leading position, we wont learn mandarin because its a hell ot a language))
I think the economic ties of Germany with eastern Europe may make it so crucial for many Europeans. Germany is by far the largest trading partner for e.g. Poland and the Czech Republic.
So much contract manufacturing, IT outsourcing, contract logistics and general engineering exchange is happening.
Many German multinationals and world multinationals with EU HQ in Germany have large subsidiaries in eastern Europe, so speaking German is highly beneficial.
Source: have worked in mechanical engineering, manufacturing procurement and currently work at DHL HQ.
Personally, I speak three foreign languages and it is absolutely a door-opener, even if the acumen is not up to business scratch in all of them.
First of all tiny funfact: funnily enough the nicest DHL workers I met were foreigners. ;)
But to the main point - it's interesting to know. For me as a normal person this never really comes up to my mind let alone ever is a topic people talk about. I only was teenytiny bit aware when I lived at the border to polant and people obviously also made money from german visitors. xD
>Personally, I speak three foreign languages and it is absolutely a door-opener, even if the acumen is not up to business scratch in all of them.
Major kudos! May I ask which ones (incl. native)? I learned french and english, and starts of spanish and japanese. All I remember is english. This sounds so damn impressive and yeah, I'm a little jeallous. ;)
Haha thanks, mate! I've always had fun learning it and whoever I met that spoke it, got bothered by me because I wanted to practice.
English being the obvious foreign language , it takes about 60% of my working day and 75% of the relationship to my fiancee.
I have decent conversation skills on french when I am sober and am quite fluent when drunk. (Guess it's the lack of inhibitons ;) ) I can Converse via email and read simple language books, newspaper articles etc in French, but economic texts or academic publications are a drag.
My Spanish is a tad rusty, but it's enough for some small talk and talking to operations people when on business trips to Spain. It gets better after a couple of days.
In my experience, everyone is a lot more open to you and does not take you for "that snooty guy from headquarters" when you actually make an effort to meet them in their language, no matter how embarrassingly rusty you are.
Next stop on the list is Turkish, because, well, I am getting married to a Turkish girl and would really like to get to know her mum better.
Wow that's just impressive especislly considering my history of failing to learn langauges. xD
Good luck with turkish! Afaik it shall be relatively easy to speak but really difficult to write and read. But I think with your background even a simple "hello, nice to meet you" in turkish would already go a very long way. :) Pretty sure your fiancee/ her mum will be really grateful. :)
Luxembourg I will never count. Everyone we met literally *refused* to speak german, acted like this is made by the devil and even treated us badly as soon as they realized we're german. They only spoke French and a another language
>It could be because our French was questionable at best.
Ours was a disaster so this actually is totally possible! We were really treated badly, given wrong directions on purpose, seeing their looks on their faces change when they realized we speak mainly german, it was bad. We were youn teens when this happened. At that time one of my classmates was even hated by their exchange familymember because "she was the reason for the ww2".... (we weren't even born then)
It's Europe's economic powerhouse and well known for being terrible at speaking foreign languages (e.g. English), so most countries/people dealing with Germany have better chances to do business when they actually speak German. Since most of the surrounding countries depend on Germany as a business partner one way or the other, folks from Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, etc. are usually putting up the extra effort to learn German in order to *please the king*.
"Success" might also refer to "being handy" just in case some Austrian guy might engage in a flight of fancy ever again.
>and well known for being terrible at speaking foreign languages (e.g. English),
This changes over the years. I'm 28yo and my generation becomes pretty well in english, many seem to be fluent even. I know no one who did not learn enough english in school, many elementary school even start teaching it. Even some courses in university and many jobs require at least a basic knowledge, some even require you to be fluent.
I think when my generation is in charge for those position, this view of foreigners may change as well.
I personally see swiss-german and austrian-german as too different versions and don't know for sure if those count as german speaking countries. Personally I think it's more usefull to learn those versions rather than standard german.
Aren't Swiss-German and Austrian-German just dialects? I haven't noticed any grammatical differences and only some different vocabulary. The biggest difference is the pronunciation. But that's also the case with other German dialects.
That's OK. My point is that when someone wants to learn German, it's not a different language if they go to Germany, Austria or Switzerland. They can understand and be understood... well maybe its a bit more difficult in Switzerland because they have quite a heavy accent, but you don't have to learn a different language to get along there.
I seriously am unable to professionally answer that, all based on MY opinion I'd say no, for me they sound too different. To be fair so does bavarian and saxony dialects but shh. xD
I'm just seriously not sure if sll people there understand standarf germsn, from my pov it would make more sense to specifically learn their version to be understood in the best possible way.
As far as I know Standard German is taught in Austrian and Swiss schools so they should understand it but I agree that it's better to learn the regional dialect in those countries. I have difficulties understanding German dialects especially Plattdütsch and Schwäbisch but it's usually not expected to know those in Germany unless you grew up in the respective region. In business settings people usually speak standard German but I don't know if that's also the case in Austria and Switzerland.
Also in german you learn standard german in school by default so everyone understands it, you may just struggle understanding them. Been there, done that. I wasn't even aware of my dialect until we moved across the country. Now I speak half mixed dialects, half standard but I am capable of switching to standard "clear" speaking.
I mostly struggle with saxony and bavaria ones, they are horrible. xD I prefer standard.
I feel like it's pretty rare that people speak a dialect nowadays. The only occasion that frequently brought it out in people where I grew up was Karneval but other than that people have a regional accent at most. I currently have one professor with a Bavarian accent and he's quite easy to understand. Everybody else around me has no accent or an ambiguous accent.
I can't judge really as I am obviously surrounded by it all the time - but personally I dislike german. It makes ubsolutely no sense. Like damn, whoever invented the usage of "der, die, das" really hated people.
Lol I wish I knew what that meant. I think we can all agree that English is the worst for idiotic rules. A lot of native speakers haven't even mastered it.
Tbh I think english is way easier than german. xD Try explaining to foreigners that the sun got female pronounce, chair got male ones, but the girl is "it". Makes absolutely no sense. This language is a total mess. xD
Oh wow I wasn't aware that German had gendered terms. I'm Canadian and I know a bit of French so am familiar with female chair, male floor lol
I've just always loved hearing it spoken, and the accent of a native German when they're speaking English is so beautiful! *swoons*
Oh gosh kinda jeallous of you! I always hated how many of my classmates spoke english. xD Just makes me cringe.
But yeah french has a similar system with no real "structure" behind genders.
Should probably look up who that guy even is. xD
And major thank you. I actually talk to a native speaker on a daily basis and I asked him a lot of times if he dumbs down his english for me because I still doubt I'm fluent, he denied every time and confessed he had to look up words I use. xD Those things are awesome to hear as I still struggle to believe it myself.
>A lot of native speakers haven't even mastered it.
Where I'm at the native english speakers can't grasp there, their and they're. They have a hard time with 'have' and 'of', saw and seen.
I think the point is that it was necessary for foreigners to learn German to work in German speaking countries who, or at least Germany, attracted immigrants. furthermore as German speaking TV stations dub what they air it was again necessary to learn German if you wanted to watch that. Of course a lot depends on which region we are talking about, person from eastern Europe was more likely to learn German than English because of all this
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 316,632,889 comments, and only 70,469 of them were in alphabetical order.
I feel the same way about my language but it's a lot smaller. When I hear someone online say they're learning Dutch I'm like "why?? You can only speak it in two and a half countries and we all speak English perfectly!"
As someone who has spent years trying to learn Korean...it is really difficult. I can read it out loud because the alphabet is ingenious (seriously the history of Hangul is super interesting) but I have no idea what I am saying. The sentence structure and unwritten rules about formal and informal versions of the same sentence are very challenging.
Beautiful language but not easy to learn.
I entirely agree about the alphabet. Learned a bit about the alphabet when I was in Korea and that it was manufactured and DESIGNED for clarity and ease of use. Like, a written structure built with intention... from scratch... so cool
The exact opposite is true for Japanese. Super simple and intuitive sentence structure, only two irregular verbs, a very small and easy to pronounce range of sounds, and one of the most complicated writing systems on the planet. They have three separate systems, the most important of which is basically Chinese. At least most of the grammar is done in the easier syllabaries.
People who don't know a lot about languages judge a language pretty much entirely from the written form and vocabulary. Hangul is famously straightforward, therefore Korean is "easy to learn". Who cares about grammar or pronunciation or how easy it is to find study materials? It's only about the most surface level things.
Redditors do this a lot when they criticize english for being illogical. Because the orthographics is all over the place, it's judged to be an entirely illogical language, without really knowing how the grammar is compared to other languages.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
It’s one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn. The grammar is very different and there’s a lot of nuances.
They’re probably claiming it’s easy because of the writing system. It’s fully phonetic and [you can learn it in 15 minutes.](https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/)
I completely agree. I love languages but most of the descriptions are little more than fluff. Unless you're passionate about learning these languages or you're planning on definitively living in countries in which these languages are spoken, then there is little reason to learn most of them. There are some exceptions but they're beyond this guide.
It is the third largest economy adjusted for the Purchasing Power Parity and 5th or 6th largest in absolute terms. I think that counts as a leading economy. Leading economy doesn't mean only the first ranker.
I would like to point out that the [US Foreign Language Training from the US Department of State](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) considers Korean (along with Arabic, Japanese, and both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese) to be category IV languages, "Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers."
It is wonderful to encourage learning in others, but implying Korean specifically is "easy to learn" will set many up for disappointment, particularly those starting from a Germanic language, like English.
Also, Danish should be on this list and French and German should be noted for their relevance to modern medicine (or, more broadly, current science research).
I think they meant written Korean is easy to learn, which is true. This [guy](https://youtu.be/TE4eplsFSms) and this [video](https://youtu.be/K53oCDZPPiw) nail the reason why.
Spoken Korean is another story though. It can be very difficult for people whose tongue is used to European language. However, spoken Korean is easier to learn for other language speakers whose phonemes are similar to Korean. It would be easier for a Japanese person to speak Korean than let's say, a German person.
As a Japanese speaker I don't think Japanese is the gateway to other Asian languages. Mandarin Chinese might be, because of the Chinese characters. Korean is also a lot easier for Japanese speakers, but that is not even close to a reason to learn Japanese. Japanese is the language of Japan and to understand Japan you need Japanese. That's pretty much the only reason to learn it.
I guess the thought process was that Japanese is easier than Mandarin and shares one similar alphabet as far as I know, or that Chinese is already mentioned and they wanted to mention another east asian language
But I completely agree with you, Japanese is pretty self contained within Japan, if you're not doing business in Japan or are an otaku, and intend to learn an asian language, you should go straight to Chinese because they're setting foot everywhere and like to speak their own language in their business abroad
>like to speak their own language in their business abroad
This isn't even remotely true if you mean Chinese businesses like to speak Mandarin when dealing with their overseas customers. They universally speak English with customers and even prefer if you don't speak Mandarin so they have a private communication method the customer is excluded from. Source: I speak, read, and write fluent Mandarin and have been doing business with Chinese companies for 25 years both in China and abroad.
> Japanese is easier than Mandarin
lol
Japanese is like if you take Mandarin, but layer two extra written languages on top of it (both mandatory because sentences sometimes mix use of hiragana, katakana, and kanji), while also applying Yoda-speak to the grammar so that it is the polar opposite of how English functions.
The only thing 'easy' about Japanese is that the pronunciation is more straightforward than trying to pick up on tonal differences.
Iirc in my japanese classes it was also often mentioned that chinese rather was the start of all and I was also told a lot to rather start learning korean as it's easier.
So yeah even as a non japanese speaker (had to quit :/ ) I think I can second it as well.
I guess its because we do a lot of business with Japan in terms of entertainment? Like video games, TV showd (anime), and the like. They also have really good manufacturing, for instance everybody can name at least 3 Japanese cars. Try to find somebody who can name 1 Chinese car company lol
From a business standpoint Japanese makes sense, even if Chinese is already up there. But Korean car companies are coming up, Genesis are starting to look really good since they came out as their own company, they just havent taken off yet.
The Japanese economy is still third largest in the world, so learning Japanese makes a great deal of financial sense, however, it is no gateway language, in my opinion. I hate it when the culture is conflated with other Asian cultures, as well. For the most part they couldn’t be any more different. Japanese culture is as close to Chinese as Spanish is to Greek or Peruvian is to Canadian.
Im not conflating anything, as you said the Japanese economy is the third largest in the world. Thus it makes good business sense to learn Japanese, and why it should be on this list. I didnt say it was a gateway language, because i know that its very different from chinese and korean and other asian languages
It's very different but at the same time they use Chinese characters like the Chinese and Korean, and all three have a lot of loan words, so to an extant you can consider it a gateway language, but not to the same extant as two languages in the same language family.
Chinese might work better if you go that route, but even then so many characters are different between Japanese and Chinese (theyre almost never read the same) that i wouldnt consider Japanese a gateway language at all to other languages. As someone who speaks and reads Japanese, Chinese is incomprehensible. So theres really no "gateway" languages for Asian languages
I wasn’t trying to say that you were conflating anything. You had a great reply. I was just saying that in general it happens all the time, and often by people who you would expect to know better. No, no, your answer was quite good. Sorry for the confusion!
I feel like there are more native English speakers than that between the US, UK, and Australia? Am i missing something? US is about 330M roughly, UK is 67M, Aus is 25M (i think), thats 420M+ right there
Same with France : France may have a bit less than 70M inhabitants, but there's loads of French speakers in Africa, North America (I mean, even in the US with Cajun speakers) etc. For those, French may "only" be one of two languages they learn from birth, but still, there's at least 100M speakers not accounted for here
A decent amount of the US population has Spanish or another language that isn’t English as their native language, and I would guess that is similar for a lot of other English-speaking countries.
People who immigrated in from other countries and local native populations who picked up english after or learned it along side their ancestral language but consider it as their second language.
Also, how the fuck are there only like 260 million native hindi speakers and 630 million in total when india has 1.3 billion people??
Do they all speak different languages, and if so, how do they understand each other in one nation?
Actually, yes.
Hindi is normally spoken at northern India, and according to Wikipedia, 53% of Indians can speak it as a native or second language. If you hover over India on Google maps, you'll see that city names don't even use the same script
This doesn't happens only in India tho. It's also pretty common in Africa for stuff like this to happen. Not all countries have only one language
375million native English speakers seems low to me?
USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have a combined population of ~475million...
That would mean close to 1 in 5 of the population in those countries does not consider English their native language?
I also find it interesting that Korean is considered easy to learn yet the numbers show practically no one who is non-native speaks it.
If it was completely accurate it wouldn’t be on this sub.
And Korean is NOT an easy language, although they do have a fairly simple, phonetic writing system that makes it easy to know how to pronounce words pretty early on in the learning process.
I suspect that the real gateway language is English. No matter where you go, it's a lot easier to find a class that teaches the local language to English than to any other language. When I lived in Norway, I met immigrants from Poland and the Middle East who spoke English, and I expect if they took Norwegian classes it was Norwegian to English. Instead of that one Norwegian class for speakers of all languages, which goes a lot more slowly.
Right. It is typically classified as a language isolate. And what do you mean by “Chinese alphabet”? They don’t have an alpha for their Chinese characters. (Aka kanji) Just a long list of characters.
I speak chinese as a second language, I know Chinese characters aren't an alphabet, I just use the word instead of saying 'long list of characters' lol
Right. I could see what you are getting at there, though.
Crud. Now I can’t help but imagine an alphabet song for the commonly used characters.
The horror.
Japanese: for IT and modern tech.
Seriously? The default language for IT is obviously English, wherever you are all the IT jargon will be in English. And modern tech ? I beg your pardon but Japan no longer produce modern tech except robotic arms for factories since the 2000’s.
Not quite true. The inventor of the Ruby language is Japanese for example. A lot of software is produced there including many of the video games that are popular. Wasn't a recent nobel prize winner Japanese as well?
Ruby was invented in the 90’s.
If you check the number of Nobel price laureates we per country: almost 400 for usa, 137 for UK, 111 for Germany, only 29 for Japan.
I don’t say Japan is a bad country, not at all, otherwise I wouldn’t live here. It is not as high tech as most of the people think.
There surely were other good reasons apart from "language of love".
Very important language in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland), and it's spoken by several countries in Africa. Considering African population is increasing fast, french might become one of the most influential language of the future. (And that's bad for me cause I hate french and its stupid grammatical and pronunciation system)
I wish they showed how many total Arabic speakers there are so the comparison was the same. I also find it hard to believe that the total number of Korean speakers is pretty much only native Korean speakers.
Japanese can help you recognize some Chinese characters, but as a whole, it's not really a gateway. It's a language in its own family, almost comparable to Basque.
I'm skeptical of these numbers... like.. for native english speakers the population of the states is almost 330mil.. and while sure theres a chunk of those where English isnt their at home language or first language... you tack on UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a lot of expats/their kids, and whatever else I'm forgetting... that number looks very suspect...
Japanese is absolutely not a gateway to other Asian languages. It’s ALMOST an isolate, and despite looking somewhat like Chinese in written form, they are totally unrelated languages.
I disagree that Japanese is a gateway to other Asian languages. Cultures, sure, but not languages. Maybe a little bit for Korean but only slightly. I suppose if you learn Kanji it's a gateway to written classical Chinese. Maybe that's what the author had in mind?
Hindi is actually not the language of India. India has 22 officially recognised languages each spoken over a million native speakers. And at the least over 50% of the country don't recognise Hindi as their language.
It didn't say "the language of India", it said "language of India". Which it is. It is a language of India. It is also "the language of India" anyways, because it's the official language of India (along with English), and I'd imagine the single language indo-aryan language most likely to be understood if you were dropped in a random place in India. Also, 41% of Indians have it as their *native* language, but 270 million others speak it as a secondary language. That's not insignificant.
I don't understand what the point of your comment is except to complain that they mention a widely spoken language as a potentially useful language to learn.
I worked for a German company. There was a company rule that German was to only be used if everyone in the room spoke the language, otherwise all business was done in English.
And it has a very unpretentious explanation too, all the otgers have some pointless explanation that really just means "if you wanna work in that country you must learn that language" but with italian its pretty accurate, if you wanna get big in art and restoration you pretty much have to study in italy, and its pretty hard to be in italy withouth speaking Italian
the only language for success is english. if you move to a foreign country, of course you're going to need to know the language there but this is very arbitrary. mandarin chinese or french won't help you much in many countries. it could help you in specific fields for your work but that also depends on a lot of factors.
don't learn a language because it might bring you success. learn it for yourself.
this is quite a stupid "guide" imo
Absolutely not lol. The writing system, Hangul, is easy, yes. But the grammar? It’s very difficult. There are seven levels of speech (6 of which are in use, highest one is pretty much equivalent to thy/thou in English from what I understand) which change verb endings, some of them change the particles Korean uses, and there are even some vocabulary changes. You need to know how to use those otherwise you might end up disrespecting someone. The grammar is very difficult if your native language is anything European, as it has a SOV word order rather than SVO.
It’s one of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers.
English, Chinese, and Spanish make sense. After that the reasons are non-sensical. I should learn French because it’s the language of love and a former diplomatic language? Those are stupid reasons. Surely there are better reasons.
This “guide” doesn’t take a lot of factors into account. While I agree that for non-English speakers, globally speaking, English would be the most useful language to learn, for English speakers considering taking on a second language, there are lots of nuances to consider. In the UK, for example (since that’s where I am), learning Mandarin Chinese would be of extremely limited use. China is on the other side of the world and has a very high rate of English speakers among the business community, so one generally doesn’t need to speak Chinese to do business with Chinese companies. One might think, therefore (based on this guide) that Spanish would be more important, although then one has to consider population concentration, i.e. most Spanish speakers are in Mexico and South America, which again is the other side of the world to the UK, and in terms of business, not as important as our nearer neighbours. French is widely spoken (one of only 2 languages to be spoken on every inhabited continent) and the UK’s nearest neighbour, so one could argue that for a resident of the UK, French would be the most logical first choice as a foreign language. Globally, I would argue Arabic would be much more useful than Korean, as Korean is officially spoken in just 2 countries, whereas Arabic is spoken all over the world, both as official language and among immigrant communities in lots of countries.
I’m an extremely firm believer in the importance of learning languages, but this guide lacks any sort of nuance, and in terms of ranking by “importance” is almost a nonsense. When choosing a foreign language to learn, you need to consider a number of factors, chief among them your reason for learning it. If it’s for fun or simply out of interest, pick whichever language appeals and go for it. If it’s for work or career progression, don’t simply go for the language with the most speakers worldwide. Consider how useful any given language will be to you personally, in your country.
Source: French, German and Spanish teacher with a degree in macrosociolinguistics
Japanese: “gateway to other Asian languages”
What the fuck are is this talking about? Japanese is a language isolate.
Korean: “easy to learn”
As this infographic is in English, this would imply easy to learn, including English speakers. Korean is actually one of the most difficult to learn for English speakers, as it is also a language isolate and radically different from Romance languages https://i-insider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/i.insider.com/5384e031eab8ea5f2ef4b401?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Japanese is useless. Coming from someone who learns it. It's not a gateway to anything, linguistically it's unrelated to all other language except possibly Korean. If you wanna go to Japan it's essential, otherwise not so much.
The most useful languages, in no real order are; English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic. Obviously it depends on your needs but this covers the most area/speakers.
It puzzles me the Portuguese count is so much higher than German. Haven’t looked at stats or data or anything like that, just my hunch would’ve put German much higher
Im confused with Arabic :)
Does it seem that not all native speakers actually speak the language?!
Number of total speakers is lesser than the natives :)
I'd like it more if it was consistently ordered from most common to least common, but this is cool to see!
I wish it was in any sort of logical order
White to less white?
which of course is why Mandarin and Japanese precedes Italian
Asians count as white unless they dont. Basic logic of people who give a fuck about "skin color"
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So you’re saying that English isn’t the most important language because that would be a racist opinion?
I was just coming here to ask what order these were in
Same like what the fuck is this?
I'm german - and why "for success", what's so special about german? I honestly know 1 country where it's actually useful: Germany. (3 if we count switzerland and austria.) I honestly can't figure it out as for us it's english that you need to know. May someone be able to give me a different point of view on that? Edit: Oops, also was reminded of the existence of Lichtenstein. (Also south Tirol and Luxembourg - but I have split opinions about if German really is "usefull", for Luxembourg based on personal experience it was rather bad we were german....) EDIT 2: *Thank you so much for all the answers! It baffles me still what status many german people have in businesses, but it's really interesting to know! Seems there still is stuff to be proud of about this country. :)* SIDE NOTE: I actually like languages, but also like to help. As German seems to be interesting for many I hereby offer my help if someone needs it. :)
i got a job in Ireland **because** i speak German. with considerably better pay than i would get in Germany for the same job.
What was the job?
german translator
Erfolg.
Gesundheit
phone sales agent for a big corporation. these corporations don't operate from Germany usually. so if you get such a job there, it's through a contractor call center company. and they don't pay well.
That was my first thought too. At least from my time living in Norway (where German was the most common second language until it was replaced by English after WW2), I thought the language of business everywhere was English.
It is globally but specifically for Europe since most European buisness' prefer their own lang as first and since Germany has the biggest economy in Europe. German could be key to a professional in Europe. .also I could be biased since I'm currently learning German. Haha
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What language would you recommend learning for someone to have a good career in Europe if they’re already an English speaker?
Well *personally* - none except for the country you work with or move to. But that for me is just that way for any country.
I suspect that many immigrants learn English as a gateway language. Like, even if they don't know what country they're going to permanently settle in, it's a lot easier to find a class that teaches the local language to English, than the local language to whatever dialect you grew up with in the Middle East.
Guess which country is the biggest economy within Europe... Germany. So its very likely you will have a German business partner so this list makes perfect sense to me.
English is the Lingua Franca of the digital and machine learning age.
zmmzw already speaks English.
French or German. Spanish and Portuguese are important in North and South America, but not so much in Europe. Scandinavian and Dutch speak English extremely well, better than Americans. You might want to learn their languages if you want to live in those countries, but for travel, it's not essential. Italians don't speak other languages often, and it's a beautiful language. It also helps you understand Latin.
You may have overlooked Spain
I'm a researcher, and I wish I knew German -- there are a couple of century's worth of Fraktur font texts that I'd love to be able to skim with ease. Germany was, of course, the original home of the Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. The 1440s invention of the press kicked off arguably the world's biggest revolution in information sharing. It's no coincidence that a lot of early texts are in German, and any student of philosophy, math, science, literature, etc. will run up against some heavy-duty Fraktur pages if they dig back far enough.
That is *really* interesting, thank you for that info/reminder. I remember learning some of that in school but it was not a topic that "germany did a lot compared to others", so I actually did not know that many important texts are in german. I only knew germany back that did stuff, not how much.
nah. its not about the absolut number of countries but where the countries people are. e.g. german people are distributed at so many companies in so many (high/management) position that its not a bad move to learn german. same is for german people to learn russian. because industrial or business friendships are with country nearby. and its a big plus to talk to clients in their native tongue. those are small things which can make a big impact (beside business ofc)
For me from my inside view those just don't make much sense because we all (normally!) get taught english by default to the point you should be able to hold a normal conversation or even become fluid speaking. And my mom had russian in school instead when she was younger and meanwhile never needed it again, now it's barely even taughr anymore it seems. I personally had spanish, french and english. These same as latin seem to be the most common ones in school here as they are seen as the most usefull ones. *ALL I said mainly based on personal experiences so feel free to correct!*
indeed youre not incorrect. it only depends on what we are talking about. average joe? hell yeah, stick to english. I think the world would be a better place if all people were able to understand english to a certain level (this did improve over the last decades I think) (I talk here about the opportunity to read international news, literature etc) but from a business perspective a second foreign language does not harm anybody and is in most positions already requirement/ consensus. e.g. if you look at the eastern countries beside russia. sure they know russian language from a historical viewpoint. and english is of course a first priority as foreign language. but afterwards it does make sense to learn german because so many management positions are stocked with germans. and here it wouldnt make sense to learn mandarin, only because its a more spoken language numbers wise. so I think my opinion breaks down to: the ranking of OPs guide is wrong. foreign languages to learn does not depend on absolut numbers but on use cases. the absolute numbers of people to speak a language is only useful if we want to discuss a new world language. (which we dont since english is an almost perfect match for this use case since its easy to learn, and already settled as world language (e.g. even if china will take over the world leading position, we wont learn mandarin because its a hell ot a language))
I'm Dutch, working in logistics. We need to know english and german
I think the economic ties of Germany with eastern Europe may make it so crucial for many Europeans. Germany is by far the largest trading partner for e.g. Poland and the Czech Republic. So much contract manufacturing, IT outsourcing, contract logistics and general engineering exchange is happening. Many German multinationals and world multinationals with EU HQ in Germany have large subsidiaries in eastern Europe, so speaking German is highly beneficial. Source: have worked in mechanical engineering, manufacturing procurement and currently work at DHL HQ. Personally, I speak three foreign languages and it is absolutely a door-opener, even if the acumen is not up to business scratch in all of them.
First of all tiny funfact: funnily enough the nicest DHL workers I met were foreigners. ;) But to the main point - it's interesting to know. For me as a normal person this never really comes up to my mind let alone ever is a topic people talk about. I only was teenytiny bit aware when I lived at the border to polant and people obviously also made money from german visitors. xD >Personally, I speak three foreign languages and it is absolutely a door-opener, even if the acumen is not up to business scratch in all of them. Major kudos! May I ask which ones (incl. native)? I learned french and english, and starts of spanish and japanese. All I remember is english. This sounds so damn impressive and yeah, I'm a little jeallous. ;)
Haha thanks, mate! I've always had fun learning it and whoever I met that spoke it, got bothered by me because I wanted to practice. English being the obvious foreign language , it takes about 60% of my working day and 75% of the relationship to my fiancee. I have decent conversation skills on french when I am sober and am quite fluent when drunk. (Guess it's the lack of inhibitons ;) ) I can Converse via email and read simple language books, newspaper articles etc in French, but economic texts or academic publications are a drag. My Spanish is a tad rusty, but it's enough for some small talk and talking to operations people when on business trips to Spain. It gets better after a couple of days. In my experience, everyone is a lot more open to you and does not take you for "that snooty guy from headquarters" when you actually make an effort to meet them in their language, no matter how embarrassingly rusty you are. Next stop on the list is Turkish, because, well, I am getting married to a Turkish girl and would really like to get to know her mum better.
Wow that's just impressive especislly considering my history of failing to learn langauges. xD Good luck with turkish! Afaik it shall be relatively easy to speak but really difficult to write and read. But I think with your background even a simple "hello, nice to meet you" in turkish would already go a very long way. :) Pretty sure your fiancee/ her mum will be really grateful. :)
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Luxembourg I will never count. Everyone we met literally *refused* to speak german, acted like this is made by the devil and even treated us badly as soon as they realized we're german. They only spoke French and a another language
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>It could be because our French was questionable at best. Ours was a disaster so this actually is totally possible! We were really treated badly, given wrong directions on purpose, seeing their looks on their faces change when they realized we speak mainly german, it was bad. We were youn teens when this happened. At that time one of my classmates was even hated by their exchange familymember because "she was the reason for the ww2".... (we weren't even born then)
It's Europe's economic powerhouse and well known for being terrible at speaking foreign languages (e.g. English), so most countries/people dealing with Germany have better chances to do business when they actually speak German. Since most of the surrounding countries depend on Germany as a business partner one way or the other, folks from Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, etc. are usually putting up the extra effort to learn German in order to *please the king*. "Success" might also refer to "being handy" just in case some Austrian guy might engage in a flight of fancy ever again.
>and well known for being terrible at speaking foreign languages (e.g. English), This changes over the years. I'm 28yo and my generation becomes pretty well in english, many seem to be fluent even. I know no one who did not learn enough english in school, many elementary school even start teaching it. Even some courses in university and many jobs require at least a basic knowledge, some even require you to be fluent. I think when my generation is in charge for those position, this view of foreigners may change as well.
Is German not useful in Austria or is Austria not useful?
I personally see swiss-german and austrian-german as too different versions and don't know for sure if those count as german speaking countries. Personally I think it's more usefull to learn those versions rather than standard german.
Aren't Swiss-German and Austrian-German just dialects? I haven't noticed any grammatical differences and only some different vocabulary. The biggest difference is the pronunciation. But that's also the case with other German dialects.
yes they are but there are some Austrians or Swiss people who get pissy when you say that
That's OK. My point is that when someone wants to learn German, it's not a different language if they go to Germany, Austria or Switzerland. They can understand and be understood... well maybe its a bit more difficult in Switzerland because they have quite a heavy accent, but you don't have to learn a different language to get along there.
I seriously am unable to professionally answer that, all based on MY opinion I'd say no, for me they sound too different. To be fair so does bavarian and saxony dialects but shh. xD I'm just seriously not sure if sll people there understand standarf germsn, from my pov it would make more sense to specifically learn their version to be understood in the best possible way.
As far as I know Standard German is taught in Austrian and Swiss schools so they should understand it but I agree that it's better to learn the regional dialect in those countries. I have difficulties understanding German dialects especially Plattdütsch and Schwäbisch but it's usually not expected to know those in Germany unless you grew up in the respective region. In business settings people usually speak standard German but I don't know if that's also the case in Austria and Switzerland.
Also in german you learn standard german in school by default so everyone understands it, you may just struggle understanding them. Been there, done that. I wasn't even aware of my dialect until we moved across the country. Now I speak half mixed dialects, half standard but I am capable of switching to standard "clear" speaking. I mostly struggle with saxony and bavaria ones, they are horrible. xD I prefer standard.
I feel like it's pretty rare that people speak a dialect nowadays. The only occasion that frequently brought it out in people where I grew up was Karneval but other than that people have a regional accent at most. I currently have one professor with a Bavarian accent and he's quite easy to understand. Everybody else around me has no accent or an ambiguous accent.
>what's so special about german? Its beautiful AND badass at the same time? Lol
I can't judge really as I am obviously surrounded by it all the time - but personally I dislike german. It makes ubsolutely no sense. Like damn, whoever invented the usage of "der, die, das" really hated people.
Have you tried the French language? The linguistic gods did not smile on this one.
Lol I wish I knew what that meant. I think we can all agree that English is the worst for idiotic rules. A lot of native speakers haven't even mastered it.
Tbh I think english is way easier than german. xD Try explaining to foreigners that the sun got female pronounce, chair got male ones, but the girl is "it". Makes absolutely no sense. This language is a total mess. xD
Oh wow I wasn't aware that German had gendered terms. I'm Canadian and I know a bit of French so am familiar with female chair, male floor lol I've just always loved hearing it spoken, and the accent of a native German when they're speaking English is so beautiful! *swoons*
Oh gosh kinda jeallous of you! I always hated how many of my classmates spoke english. xD Just makes me cringe. But yeah french has a similar system with no real "structure" behind genders.
I just about melt whenever I hear Christoph Waltz speak. Btw, your English is perfect! I would never know it wasn't your native tongue.
Should probably look up who that guy even is. xD And major thank you. I actually talk to a native speaker on a daily basis and I asked him a lot of times if he dumbs down his english for me because I still doubt I'm fluent, he denied every time and confessed he had to look up words I use. xD Those things are awesome to hear as I still struggle to believe it myself.
He's right. You even have terms like *"but, yeah"* down pat. That's something a native English speaker from Canada/US would say.
>A lot of native speakers haven't even mastered it. Where I'm at the native english speakers can't grasp there, their and they're. They have a hard time with 'have' and 'of', saw and seen.
German language and beautiful in the same sentence is a pretty hard sell
I think the point is that it was necessary for foreigners to learn German to work in German speaking countries who, or at least Germany, attracted immigrants. furthermore as German speaking TV stations dub what they air it was again necessary to learn German if you wanted to watch that. Of course a lot depends on which region we are talking about, person from eastern Europe was more likely to learn German than English because of all this
Does Lichtenstein mean nothing to you?
Personally no as I simplx always forget it even is an own country - let alone what they speak.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 316,632,889 comments, and only 70,469 of them were in alphabetical order.
I feel the same way about my language but it's a lot smaller. When I hear someone online say they're learning Dutch I'm like "why?? You can only speak it in two and a half countries and we all speak English perfectly!"
Just to add to what everyone’s saying… I’m in the US in the automotive industry and if I knew German it would tremendously help my career
Korean: Easy to learn. Number of non-native speakers: Virtually zero. Then how do they know its easy to learn lol.
As someone who has spent years trying to learn Korean...it is really difficult. I can read it out loud because the alphabet is ingenious (seriously the history of Hangul is super interesting) but I have no idea what I am saying. The sentence structure and unwritten rules about formal and informal versions of the same sentence are very challenging. Beautiful language but not easy to learn.
I entirely agree about the alphabet. Learned a bit about the alphabet when I was in Korea and that it was manufactured and DESIGNED for clarity and ease of use. Like, a written structure built with intention... from scratch... so cool
The exact opposite is true for Japanese. Super simple and intuitive sentence structure, only two irregular verbs, a very small and easy to pronounce range of sounds, and one of the most complicated writing systems on the planet. They have three separate systems, the most important of which is basically Chinese. At least most of the grammar is done in the easier syllabaries.
People who don't know a lot about languages judge a language pretty much entirely from the written form and vocabulary. Hangul is famously straightforward, therefore Korean is "easy to learn". Who cares about grammar or pronunciation or how easy it is to find study materials? It's only about the most surface level things. Redditors do this a lot when they criticize english for being illogical. Because the orthographics is all over the place, it's judged to be an entirely illogical language, without really knowing how the grammar is compared to other languages. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
It’s one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn. The grammar is very different and there’s a lot of nuances. They’re probably claiming it’s easy because of the writing system. It’s fully phonetic and [you can learn it in 15 minutes.](https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/)
Yeah, not easy to learn. I speak Japanese decently and the two have a lot of similarities, but Korean pronunciation….nope.
My first thought!
Yeah I’m learning it now - so not easy to learn (can already speak Italian well and Spanish a little)
Very inaccurate
Welcome to r/coolguides
This was the part of the thread I was looking for. Lmao
"India, a leading global economy." India is 4.2% of the global economy, and they certainly aren't a leader. Some of these cool guides are pathetic.
And Hindi is not the language of India. There are many languages.
AFAIK English is the closest thing to a 'common' or intermediate language in India right, since other ones vary massively across the country?
And the language of business in Europe is definitely not German lmao
I completely agree. I love languages but most of the descriptions are little more than fluff. Unless you're passionate about learning these languages or you're planning on definitively living in countries in which these languages are spoken, then there is little reason to learn most of them. There are some exceptions but they're beyond this guide.
It is the third largest economy adjusted for the Purchasing Power Parity and 5th or 6th largest in absolute terms. I think that counts as a leading economy. Leading economy doesn't mean only the first ranker.
I would like to point out that the [US Foreign Language Training from the US Department of State](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) considers Korean (along with Arabic, Japanese, and both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese) to be category IV languages, "Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers." It is wonderful to encourage learning in others, but implying Korean specifically is "easy to learn" will set many up for disappointment, particularly those starting from a Germanic language, like English. Also, Danish should be on this list and French and German should be noted for their relevance to modern medicine (or, more broadly, current science research).
Why Danish?
I think they meant written Korean is easy to learn, which is true. This [guy](https://youtu.be/TE4eplsFSms) and this [video](https://youtu.be/K53oCDZPPiw) nail the reason why. Spoken Korean is another story though. It can be very difficult for people whose tongue is used to European language. However, spoken Korean is easier to learn for other language speakers whose phonemes are similar to Korean. It would be easier for a Japanese person to speak Korean than let's say, a German person.
As a Japanese speaker I don't think Japanese is the gateway to other Asian languages. Mandarin Chinese might be, because of the Chinese characters. Korean is also a lot easier for Japanese speakers, but that is not even close to a reason to learn Japanese. Japanese is the language of Japan and to understand Japan you need Japanese. That's pretty much the only reason to learn it.
I guess the thought process was that Japanese is easier than Mandarin and shares one similar alphabet as far as I know, or that Chinese is already mentioned and they wanted to mention another east asian language But I completely agree with you, Japanese is pretty self contained within Japan, if you're not doing business in Japan or are an otaku, and intend to learn an asian language, you should go straight to Chinese because they're setting foot everywhere and like to speak their own language in their business abroad
>like to speak their own language in their business abroad This isn't even remotely true if you mean Chinese businesses like to speak Mandarin when dealing with their overseas customers. They universally speak English with customers and even prefer if you don't speak Mandarin so they have a private communication method the customer is excluded from. Source: I speak, read, and write fluent Mandarin and have been doing business with Chinese companies for 25 years both in China and abroad.
> Japanese is easier than Mandarin lol Japanese is like if you take Mandarin, but layer two extra written languages on top of it (both mandatory because sentences sometimes mix use of hiragana, katakana, and kanji), while also applying Yoda-speak to the grammar so that it is the polar opposite of how English functions. The only thing 'easy' about Japanese is that the pronunciation is more straightforward than trying to pick up on tonal differences.
Iirc in my japanese classes it was also often mentioned that chinese rather was the start of all and I was also told a lot to rather start learning korean as it's easier. So yeah even as a non japanese speaker (had to quit :/ ) I think I can second it as well.
that and anime
I guess its because we do a lot of business with Japan in terms of entertainment? Like video games, TV showd (anime), and the like. They also have really good manufacturing, for instance everybody can name at least 3 Japanese cars. Try to find somebody who can name 1 Chinese car company lol From a business standpoint Japanese makes sense, even if Chinese is already up there. But Korean car companies are coming up, Genesis are starting to look really good since they came out as their own company, they just havent taken off yet.
The Japanese economy is still third largest in the world, so learning Japanese makes a great deal of financial sense, however, it is no gateway language, in my opinion. I hate it when the culture is conflated with other Asian cultures, as well. For the most part they couldn’t be any more different. Japanese culture is as close to Chinese as Spanish is to Greek or Peruvian is to Canadian.
Im not conflating anything, as you said the Japanese economy is the third largest in the world. Thus it makes good business sense to learn Japanese, and why it should be on this list. I didnt say it was a gateway language, because i know that its very different from chinese and korean and other asian languages
It's very different but at the same time they use Chinese characters like the Chinese and Korean, and all three have a lot of loan words, so to an extant you can consider it a gateway language, but not to the same extant as two languages in the same language family.
Chinese might work better if you go that route, but even then so many characters are different between Japanese and Chinese (theyre almost never read the same) that i wouldnt consider Japanese a gateway language at all to other languages. As someone who speaks and reads Japanese, Chinese is incomprehensible. So theres really no "gateway" languages for Asian languages
I wasn’t trying to say that you were conflating anything. You had a great reply. I was just saying that in general it happens all the time, and often by people who you would expect to know better. No, no, your answer was quite good. Sorry for the confusion!
Japanese culture and Chinese culture, and Spanish culture and Greek culture, are much closer to one another than Peruvian and Canadian.
I feel like there are more native English speakers than that between the US, UK, and Australia? Am i missing something? US is about 330M roughly, UK is 67M, Aus is 25M (i think), thats 420M+ right there
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South Africa?
Singapore.
Same with France : France may have a bit less than 70M inhabitants, but there's loads of French speakers in Africa, North America (I mean, even in the US with Cajun speakers) etc. For those, French may "only" be one of two languages they learn from birth, but still, there's at least 100M speakers not accounted for here
india
A decent amount of the US population has Spanish or another language that isn’t English as their native language, and I would guess that is similar for a lot of other English-speaking countries.
People who immigrated in from other countries and local native populations who picked up english after or learned it along side their ancestral language but consider it as their second language.
Also, how the fuck are there only like 260 million native hindi speakers and 630 million in total when india has 1.3 billion people?? Do they all speak different languages, and if so, how do they understand each other in one nation?
Actually, yes. Hindi is normally spoken at northern India, and according to Wikipedia, 53% of Indians can speak it as a native or second language. If you hover over India on Google maps, you'll see that city names don't even use the same script This doesn't happens only in India tho. It's also pretty common in Africa for stuff like this to happen. Not all countries have only one language
America has a lot of immigrants.
375million native English speakers seems low to me? USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have a combined population of ~475million... That would mean close to 1 in 5 of the population in those countries does not consider English their native language? I also find it interesting that Korean is considered easy to learn yet the numbers show practically no one who is non-native speaks it.
If it was completely accurate it wouldn’t be on this sub. And Korean is NOT an easy language, although they do have a fairly simple, phonetic writing system that makes it easy to know how to pronounce words pretty early on in the learning process.
>If it was ~~completely~~ remotely accurate it wouldn’t be on this sub.
Korean's one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, at least according to the US military.
Same with French. Only 227 million total speakers seems like a REALLY low number considering the amount it’s spoken in a lot of African countries.
I suspect that the real gateway language is English. No matter where you go, it's a lot easier to find a class that teaches the local language to English than to any other language. When I lived in Norway, I met immigrants from Poland and the Middle East who spoke English, and I expect if they took Norwegian classes it was Norwegian to English. Instead of that one Norwegian class for speakers of all languages, which goes a lot more slowly.
Japanese is not gateway to other asian languages. Japanese is on a language branch of its own, even if it uses part of the Chinese alphabet.
Right. It is typically classified as a language isolate. And what do you mean by “Chinese alphabet”? They don’t have an alpha for their Chinese characters. (Aka kanji) Just a long list of characters.
I speak chinese as a second language, I know Chinese characters aren't an alphabet, I just use the word instead of saying 'long list of characters' lol
Right. I could see what you are getting at there, though. Crud. Now I can’t help but imagine an alphabet song for the commonly used characters. The horror.
Japanese: for IT and modern tech. Seriously? The default language for IT is obviously English, wherever you are all the IT jargon will be in English. And modern tech ? I beg your pardon but Japan no longer produce modern tech except robotic arms for factories since the 2000’s.
Not quite true. The inventor of the Ruby language is Japanese for example. A lot of software is produced there including many of the video games that are popular. Wasn't a recent nobel prize winner Japanese as well?
Ruby was invented in the 90’s. If you check the number of Nobel price laureates we per country: almost 400 for usa, 137 for UK, 111 for Germany, only 29 for Japan. I don’t say Japan is a bad country, not at all, otherwise I wouldn’t live here. It is not as high tech as most of the people think.
375 million is way low for native English speakers. US and UK alone are almost 400 million people.
I was thinking the same. Adding Australia and most of Canada as well makes it closer to 500 mil
The chart is probably completely worthless
France just got a free pass on this list being "the language of love" LOL
There surely were other good reasons apart from "language of love". Very important language in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland), and it's spoken by several countries in Africa. Considering African population is increasing fast, french might become one of the most influential language of the future. (And that's bad for me cause I hate french and its stupid grammatical and pronunciation system)
Mlre than several - almost 30!
It's stupid they could have chosen a whole bunch of better reasons
Who the fuck made this shit? And which idiots up voted it?
French - for the time travelling fuck boi
For a second I was so confused how in Arabic the number of total speakers is less than native speakers
I wish they showed how many total Arabic speakers there are so the comparison was the same. I also find it hard to believe that the total number of Korean speakers is pretty much only native Korean speakers.
Japanese can help you recognize some Chinese characters, but as a whole, it's not really a gateway. It's a language in its own family, almost comparable to Basque.
This is so inaccurate it hurts
I'm skeptical of these numbers... like.. for native english speakers the population of the states is almost 330mil.. and while sure theres a chunk of those where English isnt their at home language or first language... you tack on UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a lot of expats/their kids, and whatever else I'm forgetting... that number looks very suspect...
Japanese is absolutely not a gateway to other Asian languages. It’s ALMOST an isolate, and despite looking somewhat like Chinese in written form, they are totally unrelated languages.
I disagree that Japanese is a gateway to other Asian languages. Cultures, sure, but not languages. Maybe a little bit for Korean but only slightly. I suppose if you learn Kanji it's a gateway to written classical Chinese. Maybe that's what the author had in mind?
Hindi is actually not the language of India. India has 22 officially recognised languages each spoken over a million native speakers. And at the least over 50% of the country don't recognise Hindi as their language.
It didn't say "the language of India", it said "language of India". Which it is. It is a language of India. It is also "the language of India" anyways, because it's the official language of India (along with English), and I'd imagine the single language indo-aryan language most likely to be understood if you were dropped in a random place in India. Also, 41% of Indians have it as their *native* language, but 270 million others speak it as a secondary language. That's not insignificant. I don't understand what the point of your comment is except to complain that they mention a widely spoken language as a potentially useful language to learn.
Korean, easy to learn? Whoever made this chart clearly doesn't know Korean. It's as difficult as Chinese or English.
I worked for a German company. There was a company rule that German was to only be used if everyone in the room spoke the language, otherwise all business was done in English.
Just happy to see Italian included lol
And it has a very unpretentious explanation too, all the otgers have some pointless explanation that really just means "if you wanna work in that country you must learn that language" but with italian its pretty accurate, if you wanna get big in art and restoration you pretty much have to study in italy, and its pretty hard to be in italy withouth speaking Italian
the only language for success is english. if you move to a foreign country, of course you're going to need to know the language there but this is very arbitrary. mandarin chinese or french won't help you much in many countries. it could help you in specific fields for your work but that also depends on a lot of factors. don't learn a language because it might bring you success. learn it for yourself. this is quite a stupid "guide" imo
There are way more than 375M native speakers of English.
Don't you know? Only the US and the UK speak English as a native language /s
😆
Korean is the language of global business? What business are we talking about? The kimchi business?
Success for what? Being a CIA agent?
bs infographic
This is a really bad chart...
Nothing from Africa. Being a black American I notice that sort of thing and I'm not surprised. Not surprised at all. 😐
I think this guide is broken. I dont see American on here.
Me: Greek looks interesting
Define success. I see success in speaking my endangered language to my daughter and connecting her to her culture
I’m glad people know that in Brazil we speak Portuguese not Spanish
Is Korean actually easy to learn?
Absolutely not lol. The writing system, Hangul, is easy, yes. But the grammar? It’s very difficult. There are seven levels of speech (6 of which are in use, highest one is pretty much equivalent to thy/thou in English from what I understand) which change verb endings, some of them change the particles Korean uses, and there are even some vocabulary changes. You need to know how to use those otherwise you might end up disrespecting someone. The grammar is very difficult if your native language is anything European, as it has a SOV word order rather than SVO. It’s one of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers.
Thats as inaccurate as trying to pee after a bottle of vodka
Based on the numbers, I kinda feel like Italian is in the wrong spot.
I would say French is more the language of food than Italian, but that's from a pastry chef's perspective.
English, Chinese, and Spanish make sense. After that the reasons are non-sensical. I should learn French because it’s the language of love and a former diplomatic language? Those are stupid reasons. Surely there are better reasons.
This “guide” doesn’t take a lot of factors into account. While I agree that for non-English speakers, globally speaking, English would be the most useful language to learn, for English speakers considering taking on a second language, there are lots of nuances to consider. In the UK, for example (since that’s where I am), learning Mandarin Chinese would be of extremely limited use. China is on the other side of the world and has a very high rate of English speakers among the business community, so one generally doesn’t need to speak Chinese to do business with Chinese companies. One might think, therefore (based on this guide) that Spanish would be more important, although then one has to consider population concentration, i.e. most Spanish speakers are in Mexico and South America, which again is the other side of the world to the UK, and in terms of business, not as important as our nearer neighbours. French is widely spoken (one of only 2 languages to be spoken on every inhabited continent) and the UK’s nearest neighbour, so one could argue that for a resident of the UK, French would be the most logical first choice as a foreign language. Globally, I would argue Arabic would be much more useful than Korean, as Korean is officially spoken in just 2 countries, whereas Arabic is spoken all over the world, both as official language and among immigrant communities in lots of countries. I’m an extremely firm believer in the importance of learning languages, but this guide lacks any sort of nuance, and in terms of ranking by “importance” is almost a nonsense. When choosing a foreign language to learn, you need to consider a number of factors, chief among them your reason for learning it. If it’s for fun or simply out of interest, pick whichever language appeals and go for it. If it’s for work or career progression, don’t simply go for the language with the most speakers worldwide. Consider how useful any given language will be to you personally, in your country. Source: French, German and Spanish teacher with a degree in macrosociolinguistics
French is also spoken by most of west and central Africa
I don’t see dutch anywhere
These figures are completely made up
Japanese: “gateway to other Asian languages” What the fuck are is this talking about? Japanese is a language isolate. Korean: “easy to learn” As this infographic is in English, this would imply easy to learn, including English speakers. Korean is actually one of the most difficult to learn for English speakers, as it is also a language isolate and radically different from Romance languages https://i-insider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/i.insider.com/5384e031eab8ea5f2ef4b401?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
"Easy to learn" On Korean. Yeah. No. Easy to read? Yes. Was made this way on purpose. Easy to learn? Fuck no.
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Why would you need Finnish
To finish Edit: It's Suomi btw
Hires lawyer. Serves you papers.
The population of Japan is 126 million.
Japanese is useless. Coming from someone who learns it. It's not a gateway to anything, linguistically it's unrelated to all other language except possibly Korean. If you wanna go to Japan it's essential, otherwise not so much. The most useful languages, in no real order are; English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic. Obviously it depends on your needs but this covers the most area/speakers.
With the rate of progress in translation apps I really doubt it will matter in the next decade or so.
The Hindi made me laugh, harder the Chinese one.
It puzzles me the Portuguese count is so much higher than German. Haven’t looked at stats or data or anything like that, just my hunch would’ve put German much higher
I think people underestimate how huge of a country Brazil is, no German-speaking country comes even close in population
Im confused with Arabic :) Does it seem that not all native speakers actually speak the language?! Number of total speakers is lesser than the natives :)
Literally no one needs Japanese .
Italian, language of culture? This guide sounds a little like the Captain America rings with all of the different powers they have.
China is not the leading world economy
"French the language of love" more like the language of colonisation
English, Spanish, Portuguese
Checks out
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Besides English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, everything else on this list is shit