Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference.

The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish, that's only good for one country. For anyone living in the Sinosphere, that would obviously be the best choice, but for someone living in the US, Chinese isn't nearly as important. Plus, Spanish is way easier to learn, given that it shares an alphabet, similar pronunciation, and through casual exposure you likely already have a start on a basic vocabulary.

As for Arabic ... yeah, that's far down the list. I've only ever been to one Arabic country (the UAE), and more people there speak English than Arabic. Obviously that's atypical for Arabic countries, but way more westerners are likely to go the UAE than to, say, Egypt.

As a typical Brit who mostly just speaks English, and have over 50 countries on 6 continents under my belt, I've never been to a country that had Spanish as an official language.

In a given year the languages that would help me are Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic. French in some parts of Africa (and France/Belgium of course).

In places like India and Kenya, I follow conversations with the locals as they generally speak English, but then they throw in borrowed phrases (Hindi, Swahili, etc).

I'm frankly amazed that you've never been to a Spanish-speaking country given your homeland and travel propensity, and that are 20 of them (plus Puerto Rico). It's almost like you've gone out of your way to avoid Spanish-speaking countries.

Do yourself a favor and buy a cheap flight to Barcelona and make it 51.

Or travel to Gibraltar and take a detour to Spain.

If you live in the Americas Spanish dominates as the main language. In the rest of the world it isn't so significant, which is what they were describing.

In the last 10 years (had to do this for an Indian visa recently so have them on file), I've been to

New Zealand, Austrailia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Russia, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, St Lucia, USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, Gibraltar, Italy, Vatican City, Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden

Before that they were only places like Austria, Lichtenstein, Finland, etc

I've never been to Spain. Never been to Slovenia either, just hasn't come up. I can't think of any other non-american countries that have Spanish as the official language.

I've come close to visiting Chile, Mexico and Cuba at various points, but never had the dots fall into place.

Here's a list of countries where Spanish is the official language (note, this doesn't include countries where Spanish isn't official but is still widespread): https://www.spanish.cl/vocabulary-lists/spanish-speaking-cou...

That's all countries in the western hemisphere of any decent size except for the US, Canada, and Brazil.

So you just haven't traveled much in the western hemisphere.

Correct, I've traveled to US, Canada and Brazil :)

(And St Lucia)

The Western Hempisphere is mostly water, there's not a lot there compared with the eastern hemisphere. Far East is my favorite long haul destination, but both SubSaharan Africa and Middle East have their charms.

Just because Spanish isn't an official language in the US doesn't make it less useful. The US is the second largest Spanish speaking nation in the world, behind Mexico. There are a number of careers in the US where speaking Spanish is very useful, especially when you interact a lot with people (e.g., medicine & sales). Every major US market is served by at least two Spanish speaking TV stations over the air. And if you speak Spanish fluently, there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility that lets you communicate with Portuguese speakers (for Brazil). It's an extremely useful language for North, Central, and South America. It also gives the average American much more opportunities to make use of their Spanish skills in every day life when compared to French or German.

Indeed, a combination of English and Spanish will get you around 98% of the Americas (assuming you can do enough to comprehend Portuguese in Brazil).

Seconded. The emphasis on countries with Spanish as an "official language" is misplaced; the US famously has no "official" language (though let's not pretend this is the result of magnanimity, rather than just a peculiar quirk of legislation), and Spanish-speaking enclaves are all over the place.

If you're outside the US you might think that Spanish is relegated to the areas near the border, but no: I have driven through towns in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania and seen stores with signs exclusively in Spanish; I have hitchhiked through Aurora, Illinois and encountered wandering mariachi bands making their way to a quinceañera; the alley behind my apartment in Massachusetts is filled nightly with the excited Spanish exclamations of children at play.

By no means is Spanish strictly required to enjoy the US, but it will give you insight into enormous US subcultures that many won't ever appreciate.

And Polish or Hindi or a dozen other languages will give you insights in the UK.

Looking at https://blog.udemy.com/how-many-countries-speak-spanish/ tells me that outside of the Americas, I can use Spanish in

Spain Gibraltar (which is painfully British) Andorra

It makes sense for Americans to take Spanish as a second language, but for Europe; Arabic and Russian are in countries that are far closer, French and German are more widely spoken in Europe. Spanish is only useful if you go to Spain on holiday, and then not in the normal resorts.

That's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...

Measuring the utility of a language by number of countries in which it is spoken, or number of speakers worldwide is pretty meaningless. It's not dissimilar to the argument that children in SE England should all learn French because most of the ferries go to Calais and Boulogne - planes go everywhere.

The utility of a language is a personal thing. CydeWeys makes professional visits to Spanish speaking countries at a rate of 2x per year. That alone makes Spanish more useful than French or Arabic.

If you visit Riga with that kind of frequency, then Latvian is a far more useful language than Spanish, French or Arabic.

> Looking at the official languages of countries, French

Countries with french as an official language only have a total population of 434 million people. And a few of them, like canada, has english as an official language as well. Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_w...

French language's geographical and population reach is smaller than china's. The same applies for arabic and spanish.

> and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.

Which is true, but greater china accounts for a significant amount of land and people.

French, Arabic and Spanish account for 1.3 billion people. China alone has 1.4 billion people.

But this is a moot point since the french, arabs, spaniards and chinese are all desperate to learn english since english ( for the time being ) is the language of culture, science and business. I don't see chinese, french, arabic or spanish unseating english as the world's language.

> Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.

That’s not happening outside of a war. It did in Rwanda because of a war where the side that eventually won spent long periods outside their home country and hated French as a symbol of the Belgians. Ditto for Algeria with the French though French is still a lingua franca so pervasive it might as well be official.

Why would an entire country that’s not undergoing a war or revolution stop speaking a language basically all educated people speak? Where is the political benefit in doing so?

Also, it takes a good and organized educational system to get everyone to learn a new language. Without that people only learn the languages that are already spoken around them. I'm struggling to imagine these listed African countries pull it off in the same way that, e.g., Germany did with English post-WWII, or China did with Mandarin.

> Why would an entire country that’s not undergoing a war or revolution stop speaking a language basically all educated people speak?

Usually nationalism and self-interest. It's why england switched from norman french to english a few hundred years ago. It's also why kazahkstan switched from cryllic to latin alphabet recently and has been pushing for kazakh and english education to the detriment of russian.

> Where is the political benefit in doing so?

To get rid of their former foreign masters' language? As france's power and influence continues to wane, what incentive is there for africans to hold onto a language forced upon them by colonizers? The french language is a symbol of humiliation for a lot of african and asian countries and their elites. Especially the nationalists.

I'm not saying it will happen, but it could. Especially if france declines further and the political and financial incentive to stick to french disappears.

China is a large country with many regions so that’s a pretty big handwave, like saying ‘English is useless outside of North America.

Not to mention the huge economic and culture importance of it in the future give that vasts amounts of culture products are produced in China.

There may be more countries speaking it, but many of those countries are practically speaking, not as important as China because they don’t produce much exported culture.

Even Korean and Japanese IMHO arguably have greater use dur to Kdrama/pop And Anime. Whereas Arabic would only be useful during tourist trips and practically speaking it’s easier for people to consume exported culture than to travel to dozens of countries.

The better stat to use is # of speakers worldwide, not official languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

The top 10 list is, in order, English, Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, French, Malay, Russian, Bengali, and Portuguese.

English we already speak. Mandarin is primarily useful in China and not so much otherwise. Hindustani has the same problem but for India, and there's also a good amount of overlap with English there too. Spanish is the next language in the list, above Arabic and French. Incidentally I speak some French, and didn't find it that necessary for navigating the two French-speaking countries I've visited so far. English was widely spoken and understood.

And I have to point out the irony here of being accused of being US-centric when I'm talking about Spanish, and of visiting other countries where Spanish is dominant (Spain and most of South/Central America).

French can come in very handy in many places in Africa, in the same vein as Spanish is in South and Central America.

The interesting statistic is to look at languages with much higher L2 speakers than L1 speakers. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are the main languages in this category, with Russian and Hindi having roughly as many L2 as L1. What these statistics are telling you is which languages act as lingua francas among non-native speakers. By contrast, languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese are spoken by a large number of natives but don't have much use for non-native speakers. It's less useful to learn those kinds of languages unless you specifically want to talk with those speakers.

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