Learn to speak Chinese, German, English, and Afrikaans, and you'll be able to speak with probably over half the world population.
Wait, German? I think Spanish or French would be more suitable. I mean, they hardly even speak German in Schweiz and Austria, let alone anywhere else
I'm also not sure what Afrikaans is even doing on that list. Did you mean Swahili?
Well, Spanish or French would work just as well, as would probably Italian. They're all very widely spread languages. I chose German since it's more central and differentiated from English. Russian was there originally, I guess that would work too. I was trying to think of the most widespread languages avoiding overlap, thus no Spanish.
Yeah, I probably meant Swahili. Africa has been sadly neglected in my studies. I'm not sure which language is most likely to be understood over there.
It's also taking into account most countries are bilingual to some extent. The vast majority of people on Earth at least speak English, I imagine Chinese is widely studied in Asia where English isn't taught, and a few fallback languages like Spanish, German, Russian, or French could get you understood most places in the world.
Everyone here speaks English but I think Americans are a minority if you count some of the other countries together. The Scandinavians for example are all over these boards.
Learn to speak Chinese, German, English, and Afrikaans, and you'll be able to speak with probably over half the world population.
Wait, German? I think Spanish or French would be more suitable. I mean, they hardly even speak German in Schweiz and Austria, let alone anywhere else
I'm also not sure what Afrikaans is even doing on that list. Did you mean Swahili?
By my calculations, you would actually need to learn the top 14 languages in order to speak with half the world's population.
Mandarin
Spanish
English
Hindi
Arabic
Portuguese
Bengali
Russian
Japanese
Punjabi
German
Javanese
Wu (eastern Chinese dialect, sometimes called Shanghainese)
Indonesian/Malay
In order to pass written notes (without Romanization), you'd also need to learn at least seven different writing systems:
Chinese characters (Mandarin; Wu)
Arabic (Arabic; can also be used for Malay and Javanese)
Latin alphabet (English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Malay, Javanese)
Bengali (Bengali)
Devanagari (Hindi, can be used for Punjabi)
Cyrillic alphabet (Russian)
Hiragana + kana chracters (Japanese)
Woah. You mean in their native tongue, or are you taking Bilinguals into account?
Also, damn Chinese you scary!