What do you consider the 5 most important languages a human being should learn?
 

I'm going with
Enlgish
Spanish
Chinese
Russian
French

I won't presume to know THE most important 5, but English is definitely at the top, followed by the language where the person lives, if it's not English speaking.

Most important for what, exactly?

The most important languages for general communication (ie. understood by the greatest number of people on Earth) are going to be different than the top languages for business or study.

If you wanted to be able to communicate with the greatest number of people in the world it would be

1) Mandarin
2) English
3) Hindi
4) Spanish
5) Arabic

I want to learn them all, but they seem so hard. I mean, Mandarin has so many characters, I mean gosh, do natives remember them all and use them often?

It's like saying "do native English speakers remember all of the words in the Webster/Oxford dictionary and use them often?"

I agree with you on those first 3, English, Spanish and Mandarin. The others mostly depend on where you wanna go or what you wanna do.

I'd say English at the top because that's pretty much the universal language used in international technology fields of development. And get real, the world in general doesn't really want to talk to the poor Chinese (except maybe for economic reasons) nor the Spanish speakers no matter the high numbers. Sad but true.

English
Chinese
French
German
Spanish

It all depends on which part of the world you are/or/going/and come from.

This is a pretty bad question in my opinion. It all depends on what they are important for. If you're thinking for International business (and which specific business you are in), Mandarin, I would think, would be very important, along with English. But if you are thinking more science related, maybe Latin and German. It all depends on what and who they are important for.

I go with:
Chinese
English
Japanese
Korean
Spanish
The first 4 are for business, Spanish is understood by alot of people, including Portuguese and Italian speakers and America is flooded with Spanish speakers.

i would chose the same as you, just that i don't know about Russian. it may work, but my 5th has a tie.
(either portugese, german, russian, or italian)
however, the top 4 is quite obvious for the ones that you listed, which i agreed to, as international importance languages.

Important for what?

Since I like asian girls, I'd say Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese.

Binary, C, C++, Java, and English

Like many others, I don't know what you mean by most important, but I'll take it as meaning most influential:

English
Mandarin
Arabic
Spanish
Portuguese

However, if it's for me, I'd go with;

Kabyle
English
Arabic
French
German

In order - for me:

English
Mandarin
Spanish
French
German

And yet the only ones I know anything of (beyond menu items) are English, French, Japanese and Korean.

But other than English and Mandarin (because of their extensive usage), the selection would be highly influenced by your own geographic, cultural and business concerns.

The inclusion of computer languages is a case in point. That is critical knowledge for programmers and some of us geeks, but totally useless (even risky) for most computer users in the average company.

As for Latin - total wasted effort. (Yeah we took it in the old days - pre 1970s) You will learn the same structures and most of the etymology taking a FAR more useful and viable romance language such as Spanish, French, Italian or Romanian.

Lexical similarities between Portuguese and Spanish: 89%

I guess that most of the portuguese population is familiar/can understand spanish. (and vice versa)

A political merger/union between Spain and Portugal into 1 nation would be great for economic and political reasons. Same goes with merging Brazil and Spanish America.
Iberian Federalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edit:

- Mandarin
- Hindi/Urdu
- Spanish
- English
- Arabic

I can understand that. I want to learn one of the Old celtic languages, but I have no idea who could teach me in the us, much less in my part of the country.

and thus, the most important language would be the one that gets the most people communicating with eachother
i.e. programming languages
since most communication is done using 0's and 1's

And on top of that, language does not depend on the internet. Internet depends on language.

let's not forget that with most every sheet of paper you read nowdays, the language on the paper wouldn't be there without the language on the circuit board
case in point, you guys would not be talking to me without your computers.. and in an extremely globalized world, interface between members from different countries is extremely important in maintaining a base understanding of their culture reducing hostile, ignorant thoughts about them
I do believe that binary is now the most important language out there.

i could go on and on about the importance of computers from airports to traffic systems to hospitals, but the impulse of electricity / on or off is the used by the widest scope of people for the most number of things

If only.

10character

and the question never implied needing to communicate with others, it just said most important, and think of how many things computers are relied on for

My most important language is Danish. LOL

considering the human brain is a computer that reads electrical impulses just like the pc u are using, this statement is false.. unless all those famous people who were beheaded over the centuries were able to pull through and survive.

i was just trying to explain that there is no difference.. it is only in materials used to create the computer.. and, unless Si and Ge etc. are not actually elements that are not natural, then you have got me

Again reinforcing the theory there is nothing on JF people won't argue about.

WTH does ''OT'' mean?? : /

Lol You're one of the main arguers....

@Nan, Off-topic x33

That's why I can say that with authority.

Hehe fair enough :mtongue:

Its true he once argued whether Obama was black or not.

obama's not black to a blind man, thus by scientific method, his blackness is revoked, for it only takes one negative response from an experiment to disprove a theory