What do you consider the 5 most important languages a human being should learn?

[bELyVIS]

I go with:
Chinese
English
Japanese
Korean
Spanish
The first 4 are for business, Spanish is understood by alot of people, including Portuguese and Italian speakers and America is flooded with Spanish speakers.

[MilKyXxdreamXx]

Originally Posted by forgotenmemory

I'm going with
Enlgish
Spanish
Chinese
Russian
French

i would chose the same as you, just that i don't know about Russian. it may work, but my 5th has a tie.
(either portugese, german, russian, or italian)
however, the top 4 is quite obvious for the ones that you listed, which i agreed to, as international importance languages.

[spicytuna]

Important for what?

Since I like asian girls, I'd say Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese.

[IamKira]

Binary, C, C++, Java, and English

[noodle]

Like many others, I don't know what you mean by most important, but I'll take it as meaning most influential:

English
Mandarin
Arabic
Spanish
Portuguese

However, if it's for me, I'd go with;

Kabyle
English
Arabic
French
German

[TalnSG]

In order - for me:

English
Mandarin
Spanish
French
German

And yet the only ones I know anything of (beyond menu items) are English, French, Japanese and Korean.

But other than English and Mandarin (because of their extensive usage), the selection would be highly influenced by your own geographic, cultural and business concerns.

The inclusion of computer languages is a case in point. That is critical knowledge for programmers and some of us geeks, but totally useless (even risky) for most computer users in the average company.

As for Latin - total wasted effort. (Yeah we took it in the old days - pre 1970s) You will learn the same structures and most of the etymology taking a FAR more useful and viable romance language such as Spanish, French, Italian or Romanian.

[JasonTakeshi]

Lexical similarities between Portuguese and Spanish: 89%

I guess that most of the portuguese population is familiar/can understand spanish. (and vice versa)

A political merger/union between Spain and Portugal into 1 nation would be great for economic and political reasons. Same goes with merging Brazil and Spanish America.
Iberian Federalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edit:

- Mandarin
- Hindi/Urdu
- Spanish
- English
- Arabic

[Salvanas]

All languages are important when looked at a historical view.

Sumerian, Hieroglyphics, Latin, Akkadian, and loads more.

Putting languages into a list of "importance" is folly, and is a way to handicap yourself. If I could, I'd love to learn all the ancient languages, and all current languages. Unfortunately, that's not a possibility.

Language is a form of communication. Communication is the most important thing on the earth.

[forgotenmemory]

Originally Posted by Salvanas

All languages are important when looked at a historical view.

Sumerian, Hieroglyphics, Latin, Akkadian, and loads more.

Putting languages into a list of "importance" is folly, and is a way to handicap yourself. If I could, I'd love to learn all the ancient languages, and all current languages. Unfortunately, that's not a possibility.

Language is a form of communication. Communication is the most important thing on the earth.

I can understand that. I want to learn one of the Old celtic languages, but I have no idea who could teach me in the us, much less in my part of the country.

[IamKira]

and thus, the most important language would be the one that gets the most people communicating with eachother
i.e. programming languages
since most communication is done using 0's and 1's