I’ll soon be starting an evening language class at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML) and just for fun, I tried searching for a st@tistics of the most widely spoken languages of the world. This is what I found:
http://www.globallanguages.com/knowledge/languages.html
Some very interesting results though the page fails to mention how it got the figures. I would have expected English to rank higher, more than Spanish anyway. And what about all those French speakers in Africa and Belgium?
Since I had already given German a try while in Japan (thanks to Michaela, my neighbour and the best German teacher I’ve known), I’ll go with “doitsugo”. It seemed much easier and more fun to learn than either French, Japanese or Italian. It would be nice to give French another try (which I’ve alre@dy studied twice, in Morocco and later in England at my secondary school) and brush up my Japanese, though they’ll have to wait for now.