Hmm. Allow me some comments. And forgive me my pedantry
[quote=Riptizoid101]Esperanto will definitely be a language that will bind together many nations. It's simple to learn and easy to use.[/quote]
Esperanto seems to be no closer to becoming the language of a brother- (or sister-) hood of nations than it never was during the heighdays of the popularity of such notions (say during the -- earlier -- first half of the last century?) No doubt fun to learn, or even useful to an extent, but exactly the most practical, I wouldn't say so.
[quote=pangtongshu]Latin. Especially if you want ease with learning Western languages.[/quote]
Only if you wanted to learn any of the Romance languages (or Roman languages, or Latin languages) -- notably Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Italian. Romanian seems to be commonly included among them, although I'm not sure what ease a command of Latin would give you with it. A further range of local languages or dialects gets classified so, but ditto.
However, it would only be of help if you already happen to have learned it, or be learning it or intend to, for whatever reason. If you want to learn any of these languages, there's no reason not to go directly for them, instead of taking a roundabout way through learning Latin first.
[quote=daleks]Vietnamese would be interesting. Would help you get a start in Asian languages.[/quote]
Again, only with regards to certain Asian languages, belonging to that class. Presumably.
Re: The predicted prevalence (or not) of Japanese and/or Mandarin, that depends of course on one's prognoses of the global power scale in the near or more distant future.
[quote=MoonFairy]It [German] actually is fairly easy to learn in my opinion, because it is pretty similar to English in a lot of ways.[/quote]
Yes, as would be any of the Germanic languages (with the West Germanic including German, English, and Dutch, and the North Germanic or Nordic languages including Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian). A hindrance to native English speakers will be they don't commonly get exposed to foreign languages as much, or not from a young age, or aren't as commonly required or forced to learn them. So they'll miss some groundwork there. Nonetheless all of these languages should be relatively easy to learn to them. To the one person more so than the other, no doubt (hey, I suck at maths ).
[quote=MoonFairy]Hindu/Urdu[/quote]
Um, that would be Hindi. I did say forgive my pedantry
[quote=daleks]Italian: See Spanish, they are basically the same language.[/quote]
Nope, not by a long stretch. While it is true that knowing one of the (main) Latin languages will help you learning any of the other; and that they are somewhat mutually intelligible, and you will find some people who with some goodwill and patience (yours included) will understand you to a degree across these languages; the keywords here are only "somewhat" and "to a degree," and in fact you'll find by far the majority just won't know what the hell you're on about. Nor then may you be, of them.
(My experience or impression is that again it may help if those people themselves may not speak it as their first language, or may otherwise have been more exposed to foreign languages.)
Well if I learned French I could get by in some parts of Africa. I wish I knew more about languages there, but I simply don't have that knowledge. I know Arabic is used in northern/desert parts.
Yes, generally speaking; but "Arabic" is too generic a description: You'd need to learn the Arabic that is spoken in a given country.
One can learn a "high" Arabic, or Modern Standard Arabic; but my understanding is it's a formalized language, that may be used in the mainstream media, but otherwise when spoken will be understood only by the educated, who will still tend to answer in their native tongue. And that speaking it, apart from being not understood, may otherwise come across as somewhat pedantic, indeed.
It is said that beyond this, Egyptian is widely understood owing to its great influence on (popular) culture (the movies, and so TV, etc.), but that it's still not a safe overall bet to get by just anywhere in the Arab world. I can't comment beyond this, as have never learned it yet, regretfully; if anything, I have trouble grasping foreign scripts, indeed.
[quote=MoonFairy]What about the language of the clicks... what is that called?[/quote]
You're probably thinking of the !Kung, or Ju (Juu), or Khoisan, languages (as spoken by the !Kung San, or Bushmen as they used to be coloquially known), but there are others. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_language#Languages_with_clicks .
[quote=Salvidian]Probably castellano (don't know how to say it in English). It's a far dialect of Spanish that's engulfing much of South America and even parts of Africa.[/quote]
Um, no. I'm not sure what you're thinking of, but
castellano (Castilian) and
español (Spanish) are (according to Wikipedia) practically mutually interchangeable terms.
It goes on to feature a map of what it's called where, which doesn't match my experience however.
I so far tend to think of it as "high" Spanish; and in my experience South Americans would readily refer to it as Spanish, while in Spain people wouldn't be caught dead doing so, but so refer to it as
castellano instead; so much so that one needs to unlearn calling it Spanish, if one is to have an unconfused conversation. (It doesn't seem to be that people resent it so much, it's just doesn't seem to be very idiomatic to most. You will be commonly corrected on it.) It must be said I only know parts of South America and of Spain.
I reckon (but so far it's just an untested and hence unproven gut feeling of mine) it has to do with the many people in Spain who resent the dominance of central rule; and with that dominant culture historically having hailed from Castile and Aragon, ever since the days of the
Reconquista (the reconquest of Spain over the Moors, roughly during the Spanish Middle Ages).
I do think there was something about (much of?) everyday South American Spanish being either closer to the formal Spanish of yore -- as may commonly happen when a language moves abroad, and that in an age when contact with the homeland wasn't all that owing to non-existent mass communications and such -- or perhaps after all less so, but I forget the details.
Finally,
[quote=daleks]best language[/quote]
Please, let's not. Pointless proposition, if I may.
