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[marrec]

I have a friend who claims French is a dying language on the international stage, in terms of importance.

I personally see it as a valuable language to learn, at least here in Canada.

In business it's still an extremely important language to know, especially American business.

 

[Rentahamster]

In business it's still an extremely important language to know, especially American business.

That just depends on whom you're dealing with.

 

[vicissitudes]

So many mentions of Arabic is interesting. Is it widely used outside of the Middle East region? I figure Hindi would be more useful but another poster explained that one.

 

[Usobuko]

English, Mandarin ( Chinese ), Hindi ( Indians ), Spanish and Arabic.

Can't hurt if you knew German, French and Japanese though.

 

[Cormano]

Español.

 

[Lesath]

Just as a note, Chinese isn't a language. There is a chinese written language, but people in China actually speak a wide variety of languages. These languages are not mutually intelligible. Thanks to efforts of the Chinese government, apparently most Chinese people know what is called Standard Chinese, the official language of China which is mostly based on Mandarin. However, a lot of Chinese populations in other countries such as the US tend to speak Cantonese instead.

So saying Chinese as an answer isn't quite as simple as it sounds. Knowing one or more Chinese languages would probably be really useful though.

Yes, but mostly due to emigrating Hong Kong and Guangdong populations a long time ago. It feels like Mandarin is slowly creeping into Chinatowns nowadays and I hate it.

Anyway, written Chinese is essentially the same across Mandarin and Cantonese (well some ugly Simplified characters might get in your way but they also have general conversion rules so you can figure out through context). So just learn Mandarin, because there's more grammatical rigidity and less complex tones.

 

[Reverend Funk]

Love

 

[oti]

English
Mandarin
Spanish
German
Arabic

In no particular order. French would be #6 but is beat out by the others.

German is more important than French? I can tell you that very very few Germans (I've actually never encountered a single one) agree with you there.

 

[Red Devil]

C, C++, C#, JavaScript, HTML, T-SQL and Python.

Now in all seriousness I'd say in an unspecific order: English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic.

 

[victreeb3l]

Hmm I would say English by far then in no order Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic and Spanish. Maybe German as well?

 

[Gnome Scat]

Most: English

Least: Kikongo

 

[yamaneko]

sindarin

 

[Koki]

If you're in the USA, English and Spanish.

 

[ty_hot]

That's definitely not true. You might be able to guess 50% to 75% but that isn't going to help you in any way besides looking for drinking buddies. You are not going to read news in those languages, you won't be able to write a whole sentence, you'll barely understand a talk show.

Sure, I didn't mean that you can perfectly understand, but you can get the sense of a conversation and ask for help in some kind of emergency.

 

[entremet]

Of course the nerds are gonna start mentioning programming languages ;P

English, Spanish, Mandarin, French

 

[Dictator93]

English Spanish Arabic Mandarin Chinese

WIth those 4 you can get almost anywhere.

Bonus round: German, Russian = enough people understand these for you to get to even more places.

Most: English

Least: Kikongo

LOLOL

 

[Htown]

English followed by another one that's common to where you want to live or work.