Best language to learn

Chrisp7 said:
hmm I am suprised that Mandarin is the widest spoken actually - it seems that popluation numbers count in that survey,
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Mandarin is mostly spoken in northern China, and its makes up ~70% of the total chinese population. Most Chinatowns around the world are primarily Cantonese speaking although this is starting to change.
 
momentimori said:
Even so i'm sure you'd find it easy to order your peking duck and chicken chow mein at the local chinese restaurant
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Actually, you just spoke Cantonese! But, quite rightly as momentimori says, most Chinese restaunts and shops in the west are owned by Hong Kong Cantonese (although usually staffed my Mandarin Chinese mainlanders studying at western Uni's).

Learning to speak Mandarin Chinese is not that difficult. There are about 40 initials (the beginning of a word) and 40 finals (the endings) and there are 4 main tones (plus a fifth, non-tone). So once you learn to properly pronounce these you will be able to pronounce any word. All Chinese learn Pinyin before they learn the Chinese characters. Pinyin is the romanised spelling of the word, and you'll see this on most street signs etc. Also, the sentence structures and verb endings are very simple.

It's just the writing which is a bit of a b*gger! (And learning Latin first doesn't help much)
 
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I've just started learning some Mandarin (with the intention of learning 'properly' at uni later). So far it's not as scary as I expected and the grammar seems straightforward.
Spanish seems the best bet, my gf speaks it (as well as French and Portuguese) fluently and has found it very useful in South America and on our hols in Cuba.
 
I am learning Mandarin at the moment. I would reccommend that you don't learn it if the only reason is becaue you think it will be useful and will make you rich (it has over 800 million speakers... finding a native who speaks English surely can't be difficult). The spoken language is not that difficult - about as hard as German imo. The grammar is simple to the point that it can sound like you aren't making sense (simple example: How are you? = Ni3 hao3 ma = You good?) but even once you can speak, the writing system on its own will take at least 3 years to learn to an effecive level. In that time, you could probably get to an advanced level in French, Spanish, Italian and Portugese if you worked hard.

Also ranking the importance of languages by the number of native speakers is a bit stupid. If you use that you get in order of importance, Mandarin>English>Indonesian>French>Portugese>Japanese>Russian>German. I saw a ranking which ranked them based on the combined GDP of contries which speak it which looked a little more sensible (top 10 in order, English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Mandarin, Dutch, Arabic, Portugese) but it all comes down to what you will be using it for.

As for the OP's question of Spanish vs Italian: I would go with Spanish first and then once you can speak Spanish, it will be much easier to learn Italian because the two langages are closely related
 
I've always fancied learning a language which has a different character set, seems more interesting - but very intimidating at the same time.

So - Russian (cyrillic?), Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese.

There is a language with symbols like Japanese/Chinese, but the characters look more simple and clean - is it Korean?
 
Korea has an alphabet (but it does look very clear and concise). You might be thinking about Chinese. The (mainland) Chinese simplified their characters sometime mid-last century. This compares to the traditional Chinese they use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and actually Japan. Japan also has it's own set of characters (to make matters more complicated). I have heard that Chinese can get the jist of things when visting Japan, although the pronunciation is completely different. For example in Chinese, the words for Japan are Ri4 ben3 (日本 ) which in Japanese is pronounced something like NiHon (iirc).

The word for horse in simplified Chinese : 马
The word for horse in Traditional Chinese : 馬
 
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Swedish - chicks are hot

Or whatever nationality takes your fancy!

I'd probably go for Spanish, dos cerveza por favore!
 
I currently live in China.

I've been learning German for two years, and I learnt some Japanese before I came here. Just before I came here, I started learning Mandarin.

Now that I'm here, I'm learning Mandarin and Cantonese and learning the Traditional Characters which, in the long run, is much more beneficial. The simplified system was introduced years ago, to help people (poor) have an easier chance of being able to read/write.

Now, that isn't an issue, and many Chinese I speak to wish they just used Traditional characters in the mainland. Simplified characters make it much more difficult in some ways.

The writing is not as difficult as it seems. In most cases, it's just building blocks of smaller characters.

Example:

Tree = 木
Tress (or 'forest') = 林

So, the first one is simple and singular. The next is the same idea, but many tress, indicating the idea of a forest or woods. It's just the same character, side by side.

There are many simple explanations like this for Chinese writing. Some of it is very ancient and hard to understand but, for the most part, it's only going to be a problem if you make it one. But, it will take time. You have to remember about 3,000 different characters in order to understand a newspaper or something.

But, in those 3,000 characters. Some of the characters will be simple variations or such of one, two, three or more characters that you already learnt.

女 = Female
人 = Person
女人 = Woman

了 = Past tense particle
女 = Female
好 = Good (Female and Past tense particle together)

So that's 3 characters or 'shapes' learnt, but actually 6 word or ideas to express. :)
 
chinese in preparation for them taking over the world :/


personally id like to learn French because i find it an intresting place and apart from the surrendering and frogs the french people i know are very decent people really .


we dont really have many foreigners up norffff so i was amazed when i stayed in london for a while at how well everyone speaks english,

had many full on conversations with foreigners that afterwards left me thinking WTF thats there second language and theyre better at it than me !
 
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i speak French quite well, but i wish i knew spanish tbh

spanish would be a lot more useful, plus the women are hot.
 
Spanish or Chinese but to be quite frank we should just make sure that the rest of the world speaks ENGLISH! I have always found it quite telling that almost all foreigners suddenly develop an understanding of English when there is money involved. :rolleyes:

:p
 
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Swedish ***, its not so useful in terms of jobs etc, but a lot of the people i speak to are swedish and thus am learning it, while teaching them some welsh in return ^^

Svenska <3
 
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