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If you're interested purely in fun and mental training, take a look at Toki Pona: a language with just 120 words in which it is nevertheless possible to hold a simple conversation. If you'd like a combination of fun and mental training with some practical utility, there's Esperanto: considerably easier to learn than most languages and a hundred thousand speakers spread over the world, nearly all of whom are well educated. If you only want practicaly utility and don't mind putting in a lot of work, I would guess that Chinese is probably a good choice, though it all depends on your personal circumstances.

you might be interested in this:

http://www.tokipona.org/

Does Toki Pona count? It's amazing what one can do with only 120 words.

Fine - provided you are willing to be limited to a vocabulary of 100-200 words, according to TFA.

http://www.tokipona.org/

Mixing lb and kg?

Google seems to agree with imrec's calculation, especially given that the definition of a U.S. pound is exactly 0.45359237 kg.

do you by any chance work for NASA?

Nope, they're too silly/crazy/foolish for anybody who knows even sixscore words of Toki Pona.

Yeah, it's US-centric, which is why it's done by a Canadian on a Canadian site.

With respect to telephone numbers, Canada is the fifty-first state, as USA and Canada are in the same numbering space. NANPA, whose name is the Toki Pona word for "number", is the name of an agency run by NeuStar that administers the area codes used for telephone numbers in Anglo-Francophone North America.

[Esperanto is] a joke. Latin wi' t' grammar took out.

There is no language with the "grammar took out". Every language has a grammar. Some have "fusional" morphology like Latin and Greek, with multiple meanings in a given affix; some have "agglutinative" morphology like Turkish and Esperanto, with simpler affixes stacked in a word; and some have more "isolating" morphology like Toki Pona, Chinese, and (to an extent) English, with each word being an independent unit to a large extent. Over time, isolating languages become agglutinative, agglutinative languages become fusional, and fusional languages become isolating.

There's Ewok talk, there's Furby talk, there's primitive-people-who-can't-count-past-three talk...

And then there's Toki Pona.

Good choice. You can start learning Toki Pona here. And yes, I do follow the spelling conventions of a language except when demonstrating a point.

Time to get moving, and fund Nasa appropriately.

Time to convince taxpaying citizens that Nasa doesn't mean "foolish".

You really don't need so many words to communicate effectively.

D*mn straight. In fact, the language Toki Pona has only about 120 words.

So using only those 60 or so words/phrases say "water".

The Toki Pona word for water is telo .

At least they're not speaking a constructed language that may hold the record for fewest words in a human-experience-complete language: Toki Pona has 120 words.

why the hell can't the entire world switch to English(first choice) or Esperanto

Because even Esperanto is more complicated than Toki Pona, which manages to say almost everything with only 120 words.

Will the world standardize on English

Or will the world standardize on a simple language with only 120 words?

There are some bugs in the English language(s)

Fact: In both GBA software development and spoken language development, it's easier to avoid bugs if you Keep It Simple Stupid. For example, if a language has only 120 words, how can anybody screw that up?

If you want the linguistic equivalent of RISC then, check out toki pona [sic] with its whopping 128-word vocabulary.

Is Spanish better than English? Does Japanese trump Swahili?

What about Toki Pona? It's a small spoken language with 120 words that don't inflect. Whether Toki Pona is small in a practical way or small in an impractical way is still up in the air.

Is Spanish better than English? Does Japanese trump Swahili?

What about Toki Pona? It's a small spoken language with 120 words that don't inflect. Whether Toki Pona is small in a practical way or small in an impractical way is still up in the air.

What we seriously need is one common language that borrows terms and ideas from a variety of languages, which could (in theory) assist people in learning that language...

For basic communication, try Toki Pona. 120 words, no hard inflections to memorize; however, it doesn't work well for technical material.

Or take a step up and learn Esperanto.

I thought the whole point of Newspeak and doublethink was so we wouldn't have so many words, and everything would make more sense.

The problem with Newspeak was that it was made impossible to express some ideas. Toki Pona, on the other hand, has only 120 words while retaining just about all the basic ideas that humanity needs.

When I look up "crazy" or "foolish" in the dictionary, I get "NASA"!

proof

but NASA isn't known for crazy things like that.

In the Toki Pona language, the word for "crazy" is nasa.

Other pages linking "NASA" to "crazy"

Here's a Newspeak dictionary.

Newspeak may have been inspired by Basic English or Esperanto. Contrary to the opinion of some, Toki Pona was not inspired by Newspeak.

NASA's recent failure to convert between metric and Imperial units

Toki Pona speakers had it right all along: the word 'nasa' means crazy.

NASA's recent failure to convert between metric and Imperial units

Toki Pona speakers had it right all along: the word 'nasa' means crazy.

[a couple pages in a language that most Americans have never seen before]

Three things:

• Slashdot is an English board. There exist other Slashdot-like boards in other languages: for instance, this one speaks Spanish.
• What language was that anyway? Or was it generated with some sort of Scheme script like the one somebody else posted to the troll sid?
• That language looks too complex. You really should simplify.

60k words? ... not too many people have a spoken vocabulary that large.

Humans don't really need thousands of words to communicate. Some spoken languages have about 1000 words; others have fewer than 150. Indian Sign Language has about 200 words in common use.

This is off topic, but this YYMMDD system date only back to the way where machine and Binder appeared to help sorting.

YYYY-MM-DD is also the native date format in Japan and some other cultures that have strongly head-final languages (subject-object-verb sentences; adjective-noun and adverb-verb modifier structures).

ObTopic: Too bad this movie doesn't touch on any language barrier; it would have been very appropriate and cute for the Eloi people to speak Toki Pona. Note to creative staff of future films: If a movie is PG-13 or higher, you can use subtitles, as most of your target demographic group can read. In PG and G movies, show a language barrier with obvious dubbing that represents foreign language by distorting lip synchronization. (This is common in kung fu films and in anime.)