Do you want to learn a second language? A quick look at what people are searching for online reveals some interesting results.
It's possible, using tools provided by Overture and others, to see statistics on what people are searching for online. As a provider of language learning resources I ran a search on the 12 July 2007 using Overture, which gives details from the previous month. The results are interesting.
Looking for what language courses people have been searching for, the top search is for English with 2,762 searches. Wow, remember these are searches in an English search engine. You'd have thought if someone spoke Spanish they'd use a Spanish language search engine wouldn't you? Maybe people just use what comes with their browser. Perhaps what this is saying is that people in English speaking countries want English language courses, so maybe that's not so surprising.
What comes up next is a surprise: Italian (2,160). Why would Americans want to learn Italian when the two countries are so far apart and it appears to be only the world's 19th most popularly spoken language? It turns out Italy is one of the top five foreign vacation destinations for Americans who enjoy Tuscany, Lombardy, Rome and Venice. Italy's image worldwide also works well: football, restaurants, The Sopranos.
Next up is Spanish (1,266). That seems to make sense. For English speakers, Spanish is the world's next most popular language that's close to our own, and many of us holiday in Spanish speaking countries or work with Spanish speaking colleagues.
Quite a few people (792) would like to learn Japanese. The only person I know who learned some Japanese is an academic who, I fear, chose it in a narrow contest over Klingon as a dinner party curiosity.
The results from a search on "learn language" are different. This time it shows 7,788 wanting to learn Spanish, and the second most popular language (3,374) is sign language.
Now, there are lots of sign languages, including English and American which are mutually unintelligable, and very little information on how many 'speakers' there are for each, but the British Deaf Association thinks up to 250,000 people use some BSL every day. If Americans do so in the same proportion, that would make 1,238,724 daily 'speakers' which makes it slightly more popular worldwide than Bai, spoken in parts of China, and a little less popular than Makonde, spoken by the people of Mozambique and Tanzania. But that's unfair .. people are much more likely in the UK or America to come across someone who signs than someone who speaks Makonde. All of which makes sign language an interesting alternative second language to Spanish, French, Italian and so on. Just in case it's not clear, sign language is a proper language.
Given the economic growth of China, I was expecting to see lots of people wanting to learn Chinese, perhaps to give themselves an interesting slant on their resume, but no-one seemed to want a Chinese language course. However under 'learn language', Chinese is quite high, with 3,374 searchers.
There had to be a weird one in there, and here it is. 1,360 people every month want to learn Korean, the world's 17th most popular language. Why? You tell me, I haven't a clue.
Les Holland is learning Spanish and loving every minute of it. After trying lots of different books and classes, he found something that really worked. And then another. And then he built a system all his own that really really works. And in the end, he brought it all together in Learn Spanish Fast . biz so you could benefit too.
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