Most Important Language

talk
1

Well, don’t know if this is more random, but…

I am taking French I and we got some interesting stats today about the language. The teacher had a projector screen telling us that over 500,000,000 people in the world speak French, and other facts which I forgot…
What really caught my eye was this:

French is the second most important language on the internet because of the number of web pages and the amount of communication in French.

This sounds pretty right… English being top. What do you all think? I never thought of this class as a way to bolster my career in computers, but it makes sense. Is French very important, in your opinions, experiences, etc?

2

I took one semester of French in High School… but didn’t really put any real effort into learning it (hence only one semester). But I had no idea that it would be ranked second as one of the most important languages on the net. Good to know I guess. :thumb:

3

Pig Latin, the most important language in the world!

4

Australian, British, and American…once you learn those three, you’re pretty much set :stuck_out_tongue:

Spanish is important if you live in the US and are creating gov’t sites, but Chinese (Mandarin) is a good language to learn for the future because there are so many potential Chinese speakers who have yet to start using the internet.

5

I thought this thread was going to be about the international language of love…

…oh well. China is a huge country that has limited internet access. I would agree that Chinese would be a valuable language to learn.

6

I would say english and spanish in Continental US
English and Japanese here in Hawai’i
I studied, French and Russian at elementary school and my only regret is that I wasn’t enrolled in English instead.

7

French is the 2nd web-language? lol.
Study Chinese - Mandarin (2nd language in the world) or Spanish (3rd language in the world), english being 1st… Everyone is bound to have a computer and access to the net in the near future, so those languages would be a safe bet.
French is a dying language in the world. It used to be spoken in many parts of Asia and Africa, it’s less and less the case. Forget about French imo. Your teacher only used those numbers to get you interested I guess.

8

Mandarin is too crazy, you can learn 5 languages in the time it will take you to learn Mandarin and some people can never learn it at all.

It all depends what you want to do, while Mandarin is usefull it is only usefull if you are going to work in that part of the world.

Arabic is the new world hot-spot so thats very usfull, and if you know Arabic Russian is usefull too as many parts of middle east they speak Russian.

French is usfull if you work in africa, and its spoken in France and Canada.

Spanish is self explanitory.

Japan is the 2nd lagest GDP in the world, it has huge potential, and is already moving to use that economic power in other ways.

Its all in what you want to do.

9

I would say English for worldwide use -

but definetly learn a “romantic” language such as french, italian, or spanish - i took 2 years of French and can pretty much pickup on spanish and italian -

but over all that

Latin - I never learned it, kinda wish I had - it’s the _root. !

10

uuuugh. Latin. 4 years of crap. Just for ethymology. yuck.

And /agree with RussianBeer. Go for arabic, and it’s not that hard to get started with once you learn the alphabet.

11

my mum teaches latin, french and italian!

I personally loved latin, its like a puzzle as well as a language and gave me more vocabulary than english classes did!

I am pretty good with spanish and french… i agree with prstudio, learn a romantic language!

‘hola, que tal…tienes pechas bellas’

‘hello, hows it going…you have beautiful breasts’

now thats the ****! :lol:

looks at his avater :beam:

12

haha, html is the first.

13

lol MT I was thinking the same thing.

14

:stuck_out_tongue:

15

I think you meant “romance.”

16

si javi, well I know spanish, not as good as some people, but thats about it for me…

17

I think he was correct; he quoted it. The way he wrote it is fine…

18

Study Chinese - Mandarin (2nd language in the world) or Spanish (3rd language in the world), english being 1st… Everyone is bound to have a computer and access to the net in the near future, so those languages would be a safe bet.
French is a dying language in the world. It used to be spoken in many parts of Asia and Africa, it’s less and less the case. Forget about French imo. Your teacher only used those numbers to get you interested I guess.

How is Mandarin important? English and French is and without the French language, the english language wouldnt have words such as police, restaurant, ambulance.

19

1 > English
2> Punjabi or Hindi, we indians are allover the world :stuck_out_tongue:

20

Mandarin could be considered important cause you have 1/6th of the planet speaking it. (that’s not counting all the ones in China towns all over the world - and there is a China town in any major city in the world…).
Now, about French being the root of many english words, yes. That’s History speaking (cf. 1066, Will The Conqueror, Battle of Hastings, French Nobility, blablabla). So what? Is this the reason to learn French? Because it’s close to English? I don’t think so… You might as well learn Latin and Greek then, cause you’ll find many evident similarities with English.
French is not that important a language in the world nowadays, and the half-billion figure from the original post seems a bit far off. It might have been true 20 years ago, but less and less people speak French in the world…