Fascinating stats from Patrizia Zambrin 𤪓纯珍 on LinkedIn:
"The popularity of a language depends greatly on utility and geographic location. Additionally, how we measure the spread of world languages can vary greatly, depending on whether you look at total speakers or native speakers.
The metrics for native speakers tell a slightly different tale, as Mandarin Chinese shoots up to 918 million—almost 2.5x that of English native speakers.
The overall predominance of English can only in part be explained by historic and economic reasons, it surely has also to do with the intrinsic difficulty of the language if only 17% of hashtag#Chinese hashtag#speakers have adopted it as a second language, compared with 66% of English non native speakers."
Thoughts from Simon Young | 杨瑾鸿
In a nutshell: Get ready for the future, begin learning Chinese.
Why: English is the most widely spoken language in the world, but only a THIRD of English speakers are native English speakers. Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world by native speakers. We are moving from the American century to the Asian Century, which means more Mandarin Chinese in our daily lives.
As a learner, the language is a doorway into the culture. Embedded in the language are cultural values and norms that differ from what I grew up with, just as the vocabulary and grammar are different from English.
Starting the learning process gets your mental muscles agile and ready to learn new perspectives, which leads to better relationships, which leads to better personal and business results.