Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0517: Anti-trivia: The most-learned second languages in the world

Episode Date: March 1, 2016

This “anti-trivia” episode lists the most-learned languages in the world. (French probably isn’t quite as big as you think it is!) 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 517. 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 going to base this episode on is something that someone might tell you about spoken languages. About as many people speak Bengali as French, even when you look at it as a second language. So if you count all the number of people who speak French, even as a second language, that approximately equals the number of people who speak the language Bengali, which many Western, you know, English

and French speakers may never have heard of. So in a cosmic sense, you might argue that Bengali, which many Western English and French speakers may never have heard of. So in a cosmic sense, you might argue that Bengali is as important as French. But that's really a trivia fact when you put that into the broader perspective of languages spoken. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. And I'm going to list the top 15 languages in order from biggest to smallest, or to number 15, by how many people speak them, not just as native speakers, but as a second language as well. We learned in episode 512 that Mandarin by far beats any other language in terms of native speakers. Well, if we look at both native speakers and people speaking it as a second language, well, guess what?

Mandarin is still number one with over a billion speakers in terms of both first language and second language. English is second with about 840 million speakers. It's not too distant a second, but hey, most of those are speaking it as a second language. But here we have Mandarin Chinese at number one with over a billion speakers, English at number two with 840 million speakers, next Arabic with 490 million speakers. Then we have Spanish. It's actually pretty much tied at 490 million.

And then we have modern standard Hindi at 380 million. Next, Russian, and that's very approximate. There are about probably 200 million people who speak it. Same thing with Portuguese, about 200 million. And then Bengali and French, as mentioned earlier, have about the same number of speakers, also about 200 million, along with Malay, so that's 200 million as well. Next we have Urdu, which has about 160 million speakers, including native and second speakers, and then Japanese, with about 130 million speakers. Next we have standard German at 86 million, Javanese at 84 million, Telugu at 79 million, Tamil at 77 million, and then Korean also at 77 million. So the moral of the story is if you want to learn Italian, unless you're going to Italy in particular,

it really doesn't register on the list of native or second languages. Although French and German do seem pretty significant as second languages. And then, of course, Mandarin, English, and Arabic, and Spanish are all extremely important as both first and second languages. In our next anti-trivia episode, we'll be talking about the longest novels ever written. 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.