If you could be trilingual....

[3countriesPlan]

This question is directed towards guys who are not yet trilingual but hope to be in the future. Besides English and your second language (usually a language that ties you to your ancenstry), what language have you chosen or may choose to try to learn? I'm looking at Spanish since I took five years of it before.. here are some other ones that may be quite useful:

Arabic
Russian
Portuguese (Brazil)

My only condition for my own choice is that it has to be the language of an area that has a bright future in terms of the markets.

 

[Rudra]

Russian - huge potential market. But very (!) hard to learn.
Spanish - it´s easy as can be, the whole world speaks it

 

[Mr. Wolf]

Spanish, because I studied it in high school and it's a second language in Miami. Besides, there is talk about Spanish being second language in the rest of US, how cool is that. Then I want to learn Portuguese too, so I could pick up in Brazil.

 

[DJDamage]

Russian - huge potential market. But very (!) hard to learn.

Don't forget Chinese.

 

[Rudra]

Don't forget Chinese.

Sure, when it comes to future markets... but asian tonal languages sound IMHO so butt ugly.. nothing for me. I´ve had enough trouble with russian to last me a lifetime %

 

[Centaurion]

The languages of the future are :
1) English
2) Mandarin
3) Spanish

If you learn those languages then the world will be your oyster.

 

[wootapotky]

Right now I'm learning mandarin and korean. With mandarin, I can get by if I had to, after a year of studying and I just started learning korean a couple months ago. After I have a sufficient competency in the two, I'm going to learn Spanish and then Greek afterwards.

 

[penkitten]

i know you said trilingual, but i saw triangle and then this came into my head:

Triangle man, triangle man
Triangle man hates particle man
They have a fight, triangle wins
Triangle man

 

[Mr. Wolf]

Get off that dope.

 

[3countriesPlan]

Here is an article which discusses what countries may be good for a firm to invest in...
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5547.html

It made me a little more interested in Russia.

 

[HandyAndy]

Spanish
German
French

 

[Poonani Maker]

Spanish
German
French

Yep, just like Brando.

 

[SmoothTalker]

Well I already speak/read/write fluent Russian and English, and know a bit of French. I think if I improved my French a bit and learned Mandarin, I'd be pretty much set in any part of the world.

A bit of Spanish would be nice too, but I think French is similar enough that learning spanish wouldn't be too hard.

 

[WhitePimp]

I'm native English and can manage in Spanish. I'm teaching myself Russian and Norwegian and hope to eventually master those then move on to Mandarin.

 

[Fred Da Head]

I'm fully fluent in French and English already, and I know some German. I guess I'm already set on the trilingual front?

...That being said, as a "scholar," I want to learn some dead languages, like Latin and ancient Greek. Not that I would mind learning Russian and some Chinese.

 

[Maxtro]

For me it would be Español and Nihongo. Spanish and Japanese. I took Spanish in Jr. High and High School. Even though I am half Cuban I know very little Spanish. I took one semester of Japanese in college but what I learned is slowly fading.

 

[amoka]

japanese
french
german

 

[Centaurion]

Considering that French and English are the two official languages of the EU, you don't really need French if you know English. French is only spoken in France, and to degree in some countries in Africa. Basically, it's not worth the hassle of learning.

Castilian, usually known as Spanish, which is spoken in all the national territory, Equatorial Guinea, the Sahara, Central and South America ,except Brazil and the Guyanas, and parts of the United States and the Philippines, is the second language in the world in terms of numbers of speakers ,over 330 million.

Mandarin is the most widely spoken of all Chinese languages. It is used by 867 million people as a first language in a vast Beijingarea of northern and southwestern mainland China. It is also spoken in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Viet Nam. The total number of first-language speakers of Mandarin world-wide is estimated to be around 873 million. In addition, it is used as a second language by another 178 million people

Over 309 million people speak English as their first language, as of 2005. English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world, though possibly second to a combination of the Chinese Languages, depending on whether or not distinctions in the latter are classified as "languages" or "dialects." Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion depending on how literacy or mastery is defined. There are some who claim that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.

To sum it all up :

The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999) lists the following as the top languages by population:
(number of native speakers in parentheses)

1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
6. Arabic* (174,950,000)
7. Portuguese (170,000,000)
8. Russian (170,000,000)
9. Japanese (125,000,000)
10. German (98,000,000)
11. French* (79,572,000)


Meaning that if you know Mandarin, Spanish and English you can go basically anywhere in the world and not have problems with the language. You only need those 3 languages, all other languages are sh!t.

 

[Centaurion]

I realized that the numbers don't match. I've pulled them from different sources, but you get the drift.

 

[Punisha]

Well I already speak fluent portuguese,english and spanish.Also got some basic-medium french talking and learning german at the moment.I'd like to learn latin,greek,russian and mandarin but I dont think ill live long enough to be fluent in all of them