Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0512: Anti-trivia: The most-spoken native languages in the world

Episode Date: February 23, 2016

This “anti-trivia” episode lists the most-spoken languages in the world by number of native speakers. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit:��Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 512. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day, and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today we're doing another anti-trivia episode, and the trivia fact that we're bringing up here is somebody might tell you, hey, more people speak Vietnamese than French. Why is everybody so obsessed with learning French? So by native speakers, that's

true. More people do speak Vietnamese than French. And I think it's interesting to go and look at the list of languages by the number of people who natively speak those languages. So we're going to go straight down the list and we'll get to number 15 in this episode. The number one by far, by extremely far, is Mandarin. About 14.1% of the world speak Mandarin. Next we have Spanish at 5.8%. So that's a good bit more than number three, which is English at 5.5%. Next, we have Hindi, quite a bit further down, at 4.5%. So that's Hindi. So it's a large number of people in India speak Hindi or some sort of variation of standard Hindi. Next, we have Arabic at about 4%, and then Portuguese at about 3%. Bengali also has about 3%. Russian is fewer than that, much fewer actually, at about 2.4%.

Further down, we have Japanese at 1.9%. Punjabi, if you've ever heard of that, at 1.4%. German, also at 1.4%, but a little lower. Javanese at 1.25%. Wu at 1.2%. Indonesian at 1.15%. And then Telugu at 1.15%, and then Telugu at 1.15%. And see, Vietnamese and French are even further down on the list. So if people are talking about, you know, oh, should you learn French or Vietnamese?

The fact is, all of these languages that I mentioned in this episode, some of which you may never have heard of, are much higher on the list. The interesting thing, though, is that if you learned these top 15 languages or how to speak basically in each of these top 15 languages, then I could put you anywhere in the world, and chances are one out of two that you would know the language, the native language of basically anybody that you meet up with. So 50% of the world's native language, of basically anybody that you meet up with. So 50% of the world's native speakers, you know, natively speak one of these 15 languages, which is pretty awesome.

In tomorrow's anti-trivia episode, we'll be going over the best-selling books of all time, and you're probably going to be surprised by one or two of these. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.