Mostly a note to myself, on languages.

[randomness]

So, if the intent is to be able to talk to the maximum number of people on the planet, here are the languages I should learn. Numbers vary wildly, so this is only a guide. (Highest estimate for total number of users, native and non-native in millions from each language's Wikipedia page, fetched 29 May 12.):

English 1800
Mandarin Chinese 1020
(Castilian) Spanish 500
Hindi-Urdu 490
Arabic (dialect chain) 340

French 275
Russian 258
Portuguese 252
Bengali 230
Malay 180

Swahili 150
Japanese 127
German 120
Persian 110
Punjabi 104

Turkish 91
Italian 85
Javanese 85
Vietnamese 81
(Jiangxinese) Gan-Hakka Chinese 80

Thai/Lao-Isan 80
Korean 78
(Shanghainese) Wu Chinese 77
Telugu 74
Marathi 72

Gujarati 65.5
Tamil 65
(Filipino) Tagalog 64.3
Pashto 60
(Cantonese) Yue Chinese 56

Dutch/Afrikaans 51
(Hokkien) Min Nan 50
Kannada 47
Oriya 45
Ukrainian 45

Polish 44
Burmese 42

Obviously, diminishing returns set in after a while. But I've made a pretty good start on the first two. Perhaps the plan should be to learn a hundred words in each language, and be able to string them together in some way intelligible to someone who actually speaks the language.

Compiling this list has really brought home to me the messiness of language classification. It has also reminded me how true it is that languages are dialects with flags.

Comments

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

hmmm... If the goal is to share a language with the maximum number of people on the planet, this list makes sense. But if the goal is to actually be able to talk to the maximum number then wouldn't you need to re-order the list to the places you intend to visit?

I'm looking at Polish there at the bottom of the list. If I could somehow learn Mandarin Chinese in the next four weeks or learn Polish in the next four weeks, I'd end up able to talk to more people by the end of the summer by choosing the latter, because I'll be spending three weeks in Poland.

I still want to be able to pick up languages much more quickly than I can, though. I admire your polyglotism.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Well, so the intent was kind of to give myself a guide to where I should go learn languages. I hope to visit most of the Earth, so the answer to "where do you intend to visit" is "oh, most places".

It's mostly a thought experiment anyway. My intended list of places includes a lot of cities with transit systems. :)

I can get about ten words out in Polish, including "carrot" and "juice", to which there is a story. This isn't all that useful, because the situation is as spinrabbit points out. A lot of people in Poland actually speak some other language also, whether it's English (greatly preferred, and considered "cool"), German (much less preferred, but commercially necessary), or Russian (a last resort).

I still want to be able to pick up languages much more quickly than I can, though.

Oh, me too.

I admire your polyglotism.

Mostly, this is an accident of birth, but thanks!

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Here's my newly acquired useful Polish word, and my mnemonic for remembering it:

I picture an elderly, P-town man. He's sun-toughened and maybe balding. He's also a flaming gay man in the classic old P-town 1920's writers' style. He's got a wicked Boston accent, and drinks only Bombay Sapphire.

He's a Gin Quee-yah.

It means Thank You.

If he helps out the set of Scooby Doo, Daphne might call out Gin Quee, which is Thanks.

Ideally I'd know Please, Thank You, Excuse Me, Yes, No, Coffee and Help as absolute bare minimum in a language for a place I'm going, even if I can easily find another language I do speak. But I forgot the others, and it was hard to hear in the softer sounds over the road noise in the car, so that's all I remember right now. Plus it's the only one for which my brain served up a really good visual mnemonic. :)

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

I find it hysterically funny that "bathroom" is not on your absolute minimum list... but "coffee" is.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Heh. A lot of people have pointed that out to me. :)

I can only hazard that this oversight is because in a public place there are signs with symbols on them pointing to bathrooms. In museums, theaters, restaurants etc., you walk toward the kitchen area or some part of the building that architecturally is likely to have a plumbing stack in it, and usually its right there, with a sign, often with symbols accompanying or instead of words. You don't usually need to ask anyone's permission, you just walk through the door.

But for coffee, you can be staring right at the damned machine, but still have to have the person who controls the coffee deliver it to you.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

A variation on this is how and why I learned the words for "carrot juice".