Hashimi wrote:I speak Spanish and I can't understand more than 20% of any French conversation.
But I have a passive knowledge of Classical Arabic and I can understand more than 95% of any Arabic conversation, especially the eastern dialects, Egyptian, Libyan, and Tunisian.
As for Moroccan and Algerian, it's more like Scottish English for a speaker of General American, but this does not mean it's a separate language.
Well, it didn't look the same way in the situations I have witnessed in France (interactions including various dialects of Arabic).
I definitely belive you though, you have got the experience I lack. Perhaps you should publish your experience more widely, to fight the myths I seem to have been too affected by.
(I mean it, I believe lots of people would be very interested in your experience)
As far as the romance language intelligibility goes, Spanish and French are more distant than Italian or Catalan from both of them. Just like the Arabic dialects (as far as my limited knowledge goes) are not all equally similar or different from each other.
I still think that stuff like that (the real world) affects the results of all such native speaker numbers on websites.
And more importantly, I am convinced that the number of monolingual natives would be more relevant. In Maghreb, quite a large part of the population is bilingual, because a part of their education system speaks French. The Hindi natives are even more bilingual (English). And so on.
javier_getafe wrote:Otherwise
Cavesa
I know perfectly what you mean. I don't actually learn languages for earn a living, just only for fun, it is my second main hobby.
I enjoy to travel through The Alps every summer by motorbike with friends, going from one camping to another different camping every days. And, indeed, one of the thing that we love the most is to be able to share amazing conversations with frenchmates, italians, germans, austrians or whatever.
As you can imagine, The Alps is full of people from european countries sharing the motorcicle hobby. And, yes, the official language to be able to communicate between us is nor the spanish, neither the french, is the english. However, wouldn't be amazing be able to talk in french or italian? of course, it is
This is why I want to learn french and, you never know, Italian in a closer future.
But the thing is that the number of native speakers is mostly useless even if you are learning for a job!
I am a medicine student in central europe, wanting to move abroad in a few months. My language skills play a huge part in it. And in my situation, even small languages like Swedish, Dutch, or even Basque can play a hundred times more important role than Mandarin. The 850 million natives (if we believe your table) are absolutely unimportant for my future. I would need to change my life and everything too much to actually put the existence of so many natives to any use at all.
And similarly, the total amount of natives is absolutely worthless to most people learning for a career. An american business student learning Mandarin is not learning for the number of natives. They are learning for the huge amount of money the country has and invests and can let you earn. But they could be earning just as much or more, if they found themselves a smaller niche and learned Brazilian Portuguese or Polish (for example) instead. In general, I find it very stupid to do something because everyone does it and because of just one criteria. Going for smaller niches and facing less fierce competition and many unexplored opportunities there is a valid strategy.
Choosing the language for one's career is a complex question. Even if we leave alone the fact that learning just for a job without personal interest is not likely to lead to success (I've seen it more commonly that people genuinely like learning a language and its culture, and as a consequence get a good enough level to get a better job thanks to it). Making a decision affecting your whole future life (as most people just stick to the language or two they have started at school forever and don't bother trying others) based on one single criterion is in my opinion really irresponsible.
Back to the topic of Spanish vs. French: the absolute number of natives is worthless here too. It is about the economies and it is about the culture. Neither of these two can compete with English unfortunately, this problem has spread too far. Nobody has been claiming the opposite. This is not a thread "which of the two can be more important than English".
But when majority of beginning learners asks "should I learn French or Spanish?" (and I believe it is one of the five most common questions on the language learning internet), the total number of natives and French being so much lower on your two lists is simply not too important.
