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Want To Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages To Speak
sciencehabit writes: Speak or write in English, and the world will hear you. Speak or write in Tamil or Portuguese, and you may have a harder time getting your message out. Now, a new method for mapping how information flows around the globe (abstract) identifies the best languages to spread your ideas far and wide. One hint: If you're considering a second language, try Spanish instead of Chinese.
If the article about communicating with animals at a conversational level is published, the information will be translated into English.
Seriously, though, why do we still speak hundreds of languages? - I know... because culture! Culture is a lousy, empty, truly vapid reason. A large percentage of the human race's information is in English, a flawed, but serviceable (and malleable) trade language that served the British well for several centuries. As the study pointed out, English is, far and above all others, a global language.
It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language. I'd even go along with Esperanto if the powers that be would just pick something and move the human race to it.
except the nearest bus station is not the world.
I am actually not sure how TFA comes to the conclusion that spanish would be a good second language. The question should be "assuming I already speak English, which second language should I speak." If 95% (pulled out of a hat) of spanish speakers also speak english, then learning spanish might not actually allow you to reach much more people.
If you're having trouble with pinyin, and since you already seem to prefer traditional characters, then just use bopomofo/zhuyin fuhao. Once you learn one pronunciation system well, it's trivial to learn the other because the sounds they represent are the same, all you have to do is link them up in your mind. I personally used pinyin for many years, but using an Anki deck, I learned zhuyin fuhao in a matter of days after I moved to Taipei.
Learning Chinese is a loooooooooong road. For the casual language learner, I'd say your best ROI on your time is going to be with Spanish. But then again, it all depends on what you're motivated to learn, because motivation is the worst thing to waste. I will say however, that if your motivation is even remotely to raise your value in the eyes of Chinese girls, don't bother, because of the girls that date westerners, given the choice between fluent Chinese and six pack abs, they'll choose the abs about 90% of the time.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
...and on the content your are writing, and the sort of influence you want to have. I know of several Tamil writers online who have dedicated following. If you want to influence online Tamil community, then I don't see the point of writing in English or Spanish.
There is probably some purpose for this study, but it is definitely lost in the blurb written above. While it is obvious that most of the internet talks in English, the ability to weild influence online is not just dependent on the language you are writing in. With instant page translations, good amount of the written content is accessible to larger section of audience, regardless of the language it is written in.
Japanese speaker here. English is not an adequate replacement for Japanese I'm afraid, and I'm not sure it can be modified enough to perform that function without becoming unintelligible to other English speakers.
The way the Japanese look at the world and think about things is fundamentally different to how native English speakers to, and the language is a big part of that. It's hard to explain without teaching you Japanese, but for example they distinguish between animate and inanimate things with many subtle ramifications. If they were to abandon those concepts it would be very difficult for many Japanese speakers to express complex ideas clearly and precisely because as well as using different words they would need to translate the entire concept itself into "western" terms.
Even if people could be convinced to change, what would happen to Japanese society and culture? So much of it is based on how the languages makes you think about things or relate to other people. For example, Japanese has four levels of politeness and you can say the same thing in four different ways depending on your relationship with the other person. Customers expect to be spoken to very politely, and using very informal and familiar terms is a form of social grooming between friends and lovers.
I'm not an expert on Chinese but I believe there are similar problems. Chinese doesn't even have a word for "no", to give you an idea of how fundamentally different it is. If there was to be a world language it would have to be something better than English, and I'm not sure any one language could cover every requirement and still be reasonably universal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC