If I could only learn one additional language, and I wanted to travel the world, what language would serve me best other than English or Spanish?
I mean, most of the world’s population lives in China. So Mandarin would be a good candidate.
Kinda surprised that no one has mentioned sign language. I feel that it’s use cases expand outside the original intent, especially if other people in your circle understand it.
But OP was asking about travelling the world. Sign language wouldn’t help with that.
Sign language isn’t one language. There’s American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, Nigerian Sign Language, etc.
American Sign Language and British Sign Language are completely unintelligible to each other.
Basically every country has their own sign language or an imported sign language that became standardized.
But learning any sign language will make it a lot easier for you to communicate with signers of any sign language. Not because they’re necessarily similar to each other, but because sign language varies a lot regionally anyway (and even locally depending on what method of signing you’re taught) and it will be much more natural to find ways to work around it and communicate with each other.
i don’t think people understand how spanish’s utitity matters in the future word in light of the big role it played in the this election and i think that’s manifested in vagarious forms of ai like llm’s and face detection.
in the end, the fact that the global south is too brown and speaks so “humanly” holds face detection and llm ai’s at bay as we descend from this election into the world orwell described in 1984; financed by popularly beloved american oligarchs; and enabled by a two party system through manufactured consent and crowd/social engineering.
and to our new big brother overloads i say this: good morning; i’m pleased to see you again and what would it be my pleasure to do for you today? lol
French and Arabic are the second and third most spoken language in number of countries. Then there is the obvious Mandarin which is spoken in most of China with around a billion locutors
I keep debating Mandarin but my issue is how the language is tied tightly to China. Helpful if I decide to explore China in depth but seemingly less so if I want to “get by” in a large number of countries. If I had an ability to learn languages quickly, I would probably learn French, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi, but I think I am already pushing my limits.
Yeah, that’s the thing: “which language is spoken by the most people” is an easy question to answer, but “which language (or combination of languages) lets me communicate well enough to get by in the most places” is much harder because the statistics aren’t necessarily collected in a way that lend themselves to that kind of analysis.
For example, Hindi is spoken by a whole bunch of people, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of those people also speak English, so if you already know English you don’t actually need to learn it.
You say “travel the world,” but where realistically will you travel? Westerners tend to travel almost exclusively to other imperial core countries and to popular tourist spots in the periphery that cater to imperial core tourists.
what would be your recommendation for an american reddit leftist like me who has started plans on traveling to satisfy a desire to travel outside the american empire?
i can’t figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t imperil me because of the those same vulnerability minority identities that the dnc failed to leverage as a cover for the genocide and virtue signal to shut out dissent from among their ranks and costed the whole country in this election.
i have an idea of what life is like for the people at the periphery of the core in north america and i want to know how much worse it is fully outside the core. it now makes sense that why the people want to hold imperialist friendly mexican judges accountable via the ballot box in a system that’s completely captured by the american empire to social engineer the masses like it does when it makes a voter in tempe, arizona wait in line for hours to go vote.
I don’t fully understand your question, and I doubt that I’m qualified to answer, because I have virtually every privilege, and I’ve never thought about international travel but from my own easy mode perspective.
i’ll restate my question: where can i travel to oustide the american empire where my treat monster american nature won’t get me arrested, imprisoned, punished, hate crimed, etc.?
Realistically, not India/Pakistan. Other than that I will likely hit the Americas, Europe, Oceania, Thailand, Vietnam, Shanghai, Singapore, maybe South Korea, Japan, UAE, Morrocco for sure, Turkey, etc. So, quite a bit I hope.
