If you want to travel, knowing English can help you plenty, but it’s far from the catch-all language that some inexperienced travelers seem to think it is. While there are plenty of countries, apart from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, where your English skills will get you far, there are probably more where it won’t do you a whole lot of good.
English is used by 341 million native speakers, next only to Chinese (over 1 billion native speakers), Spanish (400 million) and Hindi (366 million). While simple logic dictates those are the languages you should learn, the concentration of speakers for English, Chinese and Hindi are usually restricted to a handful of high-population countries, making them less useful for those looking at languages they can use in cross-continental travel.
For wandering nomads who want to spend an extended period hopping from country to country, learning new languages is a must. You can’t seriously expect to travel that much without having to pick up even bits of pieces of dialect in the places you visit.
Whether you’re backpacking with a crew of young adventurers or jetsetting in style, having a working knowledge of foreign languages will provide great help, especially if you plan to visit multiple countries. Aside from English, what other languages should you learn?
If you can only learn one foreign language, then it’s important to take account of where you plan to go. Few folks, even the truly wanderlust, will hit all seven continents in one long stretch. If you’re going to rip through the countries in Europe, for instance, either French or Spanish should be able to serve you immensely. Going to Africa? Either French or Arabic will be your best bet. North or South America? Then Spanish is a must. And so on.
Remember: your experiences in a country will be closely linked to your ability at using the local vernacular. The better you can communicate with the locals, the more avenues of opportunity opens up. Below is a list of the languages that you’ll likely want to consider learning if you’re looking forward to doing a whole lot of travel.
French
Thought French was only spoken in France and a patch of Canada? Think again. French is an official language in 40 countries, with dozens of others where it is widely used by portions of the population. You will definitely want to learn French if you’re planning to visit Europe (it is an official language in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Monaco) or Africa (over 20 countries list it as an official language). French is also widely considered a sexy language, so you should be able to find some social uses for it even in countries where it isn’t widely spoken.
Spanish
The Spaniards were huge colonizers back in the day, traveling the seas and taking many countries under its flag. As such, they spread their culture and their language heavily around the world. It is estimated that over 400 million people use Spanish as a native language, with 100 million or so more if you add in the second-language users.
More importantly for your purposes as a worldwide nomad, though, Spanish is recognized as an official language in 21 countries, including Spain, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and more. It is also widely spoken in many countries where it isn’t recognized as an official tongue, including the United States and the Philippines. There are many cultures around the world, in fact, where you’ll recognize various Spanish terms integrated in the local languages.
If you learn Spanish, you should find an easy time traveling Europe (where many speakers in neighboring countries often use it as an unofficial language), South America and a large portion of North America. For the most part, you’ll be able to use it effectively in more than 44 countries around the world.
German
German (aka Deutsch) is only an official language in a measly 5 countries — Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. Despite that, however, it is widely used in as many as 40 countries, giving you a wide range of travel options where the vernacular will prove useful. There are clusters of German-speaking communities all across South America, North America, Asia, Australia and other European countries. It is also a close relative to English and Dutch (West Germanic languages), so that extends its usefulness even further.
Portuguese
To the untrained ear, it’s easy to mistake Portuguese for Spanish. That’s understandable, considering the lot of similarities between them. Like Spanish, it’s also widely spoken, with as many as 34 countries worldwide where it is regularly used by the population, despite being an official language in only 9 countries (Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Macau, East Timor and São Tomé e Príncipe).
When you know Portuguese, you’ll likely be able to recognize some of the things coming out from a Spanish-speaker’s mouth too. And that works the other way as well. This could prove an extra incentive to learn one or the other, as it opens up quite a wide pool of possibilities. While you’re at that, though, you might want to learn both anyway, since the similarities also mean it will be easier to learn one if you know the other.
Arabic
You can skip this one if you don’t intend to travel to the Middle East. If you are, though, then Arabic is a must-learn, as it is the official language in 26 countries across two continents — the Middle East and Africa. Arabic has also lent many elements to the vocabulary of many languages used throughout the Islamic world, including Persian, Turkish, Bengali, Kazakh, Urdu, Malay, Hindi and Hausa. It also has some minor influence in Spanish, Portuguese and Sicilian.
Russian
Only four countries (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) list Russian as an official language. Despite that, there are over 30 countries where this language is widely spoken (Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Estonia most of the other countries from the old bloc of the USSR), making a working knowledge of Russian particularly useful for travel in that region of the world.
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