What language do you think is the most important to learn and why? What are the top three languages you think are most important? I have been thinking about this for a while and cannot get a good, solid answer. From anyone! You would have thought people would be more unified as to what they think the most important language is, but no, I can't fins a good middle ground. So I turn to you, internet (or the small sliver of the internet that is Armor Games) and ask you for your opinion.
I think this depends on how you view it. By population of speakers, Chinese (Mandarin) By importance: English
By job or governmental use: Spanish or Mandarin
What do you think? Of course the UN languages are important as well... so any of those six and maybe if you live in Europe German or Russian would be more useful.
Yes, the article is mostly correct. We type in the Romanticized pronunciation, and the words pop out. It is true that the words have roughly the same pronunciation, given that our words are monosyllabic, but if you type a couple out at a time, it gets it right. For example, if I type Pao, the words for run, bun, cannon, etc all come out, but if I type out Pao Bu, the two characters meaning run appear. The process gets pretty fast after a while anyway.
Yes, Nichodemus is right. I am learning Mandarin and since my school is online I have a standard English mode to my keyboard and I have a mandarin one where you type in pinyin and hit the number that the symbol is and bam! you have Chinese characters. ä½ å¥½see. I am pretty sure that is hello. (I am bad at the symbols, but there it is)
Minotaur, German is a useful language however, it is not used really outside of Europe. I have met one person who grew up speaking German and learned English. So, most people that grew up speaking German, are happy in Germany (I would think, I have only met the one guy). Where as English is spoken around the world. If you are saying we should strive for a single language, then I would say go with English or Espranto.
450 millions native speakers. And every day grow more. Third lenguage in Internet. 50 millions speakers in USA.
Maybe in other continent not is important, but in america is maybe more important than english (of course in USA and Canada not, but in brazil maybe yes)
Think one thing, with that language will comunicate one mexican, one brazilian and one U.S. ? I think in spanish.
Why? In future USA will have more than 100 millions spanish speakers. In Brazil in each school teach spanish, and is expected to in 10 years more than 30 millions speak spanish. Moreover spanish and portuguese it's very similar.
but in america is maybe more important than english (of course in USA and Canada not, but in brazil maybe yes)
I think, with the rise in the Hispanic demographic, it certainly warrants a degree of attention. However, I don't think it has the global reach (English), or the sheer number (Mandarin), to become the universal language any time soon.
Latin is probably the most useful. Even though it's a dead language, it really helps you understand the Romance languages. It's like knowing a little bit of all of them.
Well, first of all I think it's important to know what you mean to do with the language.
If you're into programming online games, give AS3, Haxe, JS/TS/Dart, a go. Though the flash (and with it the AS3 language) seems to be dying.
Making console games, you'd better learn something like C++ and/or C# (windows) but nintendo is now accepting HTML5 games on their new wii, so JS is also a good way to go about it.
For a server side language, I'd say go with PHP, if not only for being most used. Ruby is also a nice language to learn, with all the RoR.
Latin is probably the most useful. Even though it's a dead language, it really helps you understand the Romance languages. It's like knowing a little bit of all of them.
It's not useful unless your'e a scientist/priest/teacher, because even if it helps you understand, it does so to a minimal degree. Going back thousands of years to use a dead language with some semblance to current languages isn't effective.
Spanish is extremely overrated (for lack of a better word) when it comes to "important languages". It's behind Mandarin, English and French, and closely followed most likely by German, Korean and Japanese.
only 14.1% of the population speaks it natively. compared to 5.5% that have english as native language.
Let's put an Italic on Only.
It's not important to most nations...other than those with huge Chinese diasporas....but since China is important to most nations, if not all, it follows that Mandarin itself is.
