Scientists estimate that there are more than 7,100 languages around the world, 40% of which are endangered, and 90% of which are spoken by only about 100,000 people. Furthermore, approximately 75% of the world’s population does not speak a single word of English. These statistics might shock or amaze you, and may even motivate you to start learning a new language right now. So, what are the steps for learning new languages? What about the best apps and tools to help you with that? And what are the most widely spoken languages in the world?
Table of Contents:
What Does It Mean to Learn a New Language?
Benefits of Learning a New Language
The Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World
How to Learn a New Language
Tools That Help with Language Learning
What Does It Mean to Learn a New Language?
Language is a vital and indispensable skill for social communication within the global community. It is a system composed of symbols, signs, sounds, and words that are familiar among human societies. When an individual attempts to learn a new language, they seek to understand and thoroughly absorb it in order to learn the language correctly. This requires many important skills, such as speaking it fluently, and listening to, reading, and writing it professionally.
Benefits of Learning a New Language
The importance of learning a new language has increased in the twenty-first century for many reasons. Language learning has become essential, particularly in light of the knowledge explosion, technological openness, and the collapse of geographical, cultural, and economic barriers worldwide, alongside the job market’s need for multilingual learners. It also grants you numerous opportunities to interact with different communities instantly, and serves as a primary reason for success in personal, professional, and academic life. Below are the most significant benefits of learning a new language:
- Enhancing Brain Activity and Increasing Performance
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) published the results of a scientific study in 2015 concerning the effect of bilingualism on multitasking. The study confirmed that bilingual individuals have the ability to perform multiple tasks more efficiently than their monolingual peers, and indicated that experience in more than one language contributes to increased performance while doing more than one task simultaneously. This means that language learning is beneficial for our brains, as it enhances the activity of the brain’s executive functions, stimulates memory, aids recall and task organization, and promotes cognitive flexibility and non-linguistic cognitive control in these individuals.
In this regard, John Grundy, a neuroscientist at Iowa State University and an expert in bilingualism and the brain, says:
“Learning a new language has a significant impact on the brain. It can help create new neural pathways and connections, and reshape the brain in a way that makes it more efficient than ever before.”
In another study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University in the United States on students learning Spanish, the researchers found an increase in neural activity among these students compared to others. This was reported by the American scientific magazine Discover Magazine.
- Fighting Disease and Improving Abilities
One of the most important benefits of learning a new language is reducing the likelihood of developing cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s, according to what scientific research confirms. For example, a study was conducted on 325 women who speak more than one language and were up to 75 years old. The results, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2019, found that women who spoke 4 languages or more were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s compared to those who spoke only one language.
The cognitive benefits of learning languages cannot be denied, as they enhance creative and critical thinking processes, make thinking more flexible and dynamic, contribute to improving verbal abilities, and strengthen problem-solving and processing skills. In addition, they increase academic achievement and cognitive development, the ability to innovate and overcome challenges and obstacles, and help avoid premature aging and limit the decline of mental faculties and cognitive regression with advancing age.
- Effective Communication and Understanding Other Cultures
Imagine you traveled to a foreign country whose people do not speak your language. What would you do then? How would you understand them? What if someone asked you for something? How would you get to the address you want? Herein lies the importance of learning languages. It is essential for self-expression, communicating with others, improving non-verbal communication such as body language, and multiplying communication skills in general. Furthermore, bilingual individuals have the ability to navigate outside their home countries easily, like native citizens, which opens the door for them to obtain scholarships, work abroad, or build friendships from different countries.
Learning new languages improves our understanding and knowledge of different cultures and enhances our respect and appreciation for the traditions, arts, and history of other countries, making us more tolerant, empathetic, and accepting of the beliefs and cultures of others. Every language has a unique culture that distinguishes it, meaning there are hundreds, indeed thousands, of cultures, traditions, and customs that can only be known and understood through learning languages and perceiving the world around us.
- Improving Your Standing at Work
Learning languages makes you stand out at work, increases your chances of promotion, and qualifies you for a higher position. Major companies and organizations are looking for people who understand more than one language and are capable of navigating the contemporary global economy and integrating with foreign economies easily. Employers also want to hire bilingual individuals who can communicate seamlessly with clients across borders and in foreign markets. Therefore, possessing various language skills gives you a competitive edge that makes you superior and ahead of those who only know their mother tongue.
Moreover, individuals who speak more than one language enjoy a high status in their professional and practical lives. Language learning can help increase salaries and bonuses at work. Various scientific research has shown that learning a second foreign language can increase your salary by 15%, according to Euro London, a recruitment agency specialized in language. A study conducted by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the consulting firm LECG Europe found that learning a new language increases income by 2% annually. The BBC published a report in 2004 indicating that speaking a second language increases a worker’s salary by an average of more than 3,000 British pounds.
- Boosting Self-Confidence
When you start learning a new language, you will boost your self-confidence and stimulate a positive sense of self, especially when speaking and engaging with native speakers in real textual and spoken conversations. You can do this by communicating with foreigners online, holding regular meetings with friends who are learning the same language, and so on. When you speak to someone in their mother tongue and showcase your language skills, it will impress them, grant you more self-confidence, solidify the information in your mind, and make it difficult to forget.
It is natural to perceive a growing increase in your confidence at the beginning of the learning process, particularly as you discover the language mistakes you are likely to make. This necessitates not feeling despair or frustration, along with taking steady and insightful steps to complete the learning journey. The more you achieve your daily goal in learning a new language and make further progress, the more your self-confidence increases.
- The Ability to Make Decisions Effectively
There is a close relationship between learning new languages and the ability to make sound decisions effectively. Counter to expectations, researchers thought that using a foreign language other than the mother tongue would make decisions less systematic and illogical, but the opposite proved to be true. A scientific study conducted by psychology scientists at the University of Chicago found that individuals who think in more than one language make more rational, prudent, and balanced financial decisions than others.
The study’s results, published in the journal SAGE Journals, confirmed that using a foreign language helps reduce decision-making biases, decreases loss aversion, and increases attention to risks with positive values and the tendency towards bets and investments with long-term future gains. Hence, the researchers indicate that thinking in a foreign language reduces negative emotional reactions such as fear, and this is very useful when making decisions in work environments.
- A Growing Economic Market
Estimates indicate that the size of the global market for learning a new language online will reach 25.73 billion US dollars by the year 2027, after its value was only about 12.49 billion US dollars in 2019, according to a report on distance language learning prepared by the market research and consulting firm Verify Markets. This confirms a growing demand for training courses for learning foreign languages online.
The Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World
Do you know what the most famous and most used languages in the world are? Despite the existence of thousands of languages, more than half of the world’s population speaks only 23 languages. The popularity of each language depends on the total number of native and non-native speakers. Statistics indicate that the top 10 most spoken languages in the world are: (English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Urdu), according to a report published in April 2021 by Statista, a platform specializing in global market statistics and data.
The English Language
It is not surprising that English is the most common language in the world. It is a global language spoken by more than 1.45 billion people on Earth, among whom approximately 379 million people speak English as their mother tongue, with the vast majority being non-native speakers.
English is considered one of the most famous easy-to-learn languages and is mastered by the peoples of Northern European countries, particularly the Dutch. It is the official language in 67 countries, and the reason for its spread is due to British colonization of many countries. It is also a primary business language required by most companies around the world. Mastering English opens up countless opportunities in education, travel, and international communication.
English is considered one of the most famous easy-to-learn languages and is mastered by the peoples of Northern European countries, particularly the Dutch. It is the official language in 67 countries, and the reason for its spread is due to British colonization of many countries. It is also a primary business language required by most companies around the world. You can understand it well by utilizing the English language learning
The Mandarin Language
Mandarin Chinese is the world’s largest language in terms of the number of native speakers (mother tongue), as it is the native language of more than 921 million people, with its speakers concentrated in Asia. This was confirmed by Ethnologue, a platform that provides the largest database of languages in the world. However, it ranks second on the list of the most spoken languages in the world, with over 1.12 billion speakers.
The Hindi Language
This language ranks third on the list of the most used languages in the world, spoken by more than 600 million people, including about 342 million native speakers.
The Spanish Language
The language of the Roman Empire comes in fourth place in terms of the total number of speakers, who number more than 543 million people around the world, including at least 460 million native speakers (about 6% of the world’s population). The Instituto Cervantes—a non-profit organization founded by the Spanish government—predicts that the number of Spanish speakers will reach 724 million people by the year 2068.
The Arabic Language
The language of the Holy Quran is one of the pillars of human cultural diversity and is considered one of the most widespread languages in the world. It is a global language spread across 60 countries, spoken by more than 436 million people worldwide. It is the official language of all Arab countries and is described as the language of “ḍād” (a unique sound), politics, science, and literature. The French network “France 24” indicates that France adopted it in its most prestigious institution, the “Collège de France,” an organization specializing in scientific research and higher education, since the year 1587 AD.
The Bengali Language
You might be surprised to know that the Bengali language is on the list of the top 10 most spoken languages in the world. It is the official language of Bangladesh and is spoken in some cities in India and Myanmar. It is the sixth most widespread language due to the increased population of those regions, and its roots go back to the Indo-Aryan languages that emerged between the years 1000 and 1200 AD.
The French Language
French is spoken by more than 280 million people worldwide, including 77 million native speakers, according to statistics from the market research platform Statista. It is one of the fastest-growing languages globally and an official language in 29 countries. Statistics indicate that about 50% of French speakers reside on the African continent. Learning French enriches your cultural understanding and provides access to a wealth of literature, cinema, and diplomatic communication.
The Russian Language
Millions of students seek to learn the Russian language because it is one of the most famous languages in the world. It is the official language of four countries: (Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus) and is widespread in other countries such as Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union states. The number of Russian speakers worldwide is more than 258 million people, including 153 million native speakers.
How to Learn a New Language
Do you aspire to learn a new language and speak it fluently, but don’t know where to start? Are you looking for language learning steps to embark on your educational journey? As long as you’ve reached this point, you’ve found what you’re seeking to take your first steps toward your knowledge goal. However, you must realize that learning a new language requires hard work and continuous effort, alongside determination and willpower. Here are effective strategies for learning new languages:
First: Define Your Goal for Learning the Language
The first step is understanding why you want to learn languages and defining your motivations and goals clearly. Ask yourself why you aspire to learn a new language, because motivation gives you the strength and drive to continue. If you don’t define your goal, you won’t be able to measure results and know what you have achieved. The smarter and more precise the goal, the more effectively you can learn the language and focus your efforts on a specific area that serves your goal. Is your desire to learn a new language aimed at getting a promotion at work, obtaining a high-income job, making new friends, or are you planning to travel abroad?
This stage is extremely crucial for motivating yourself during the self-learning process. Therefore, your goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), detailed, quantifiable, and time-specific. You should define the final long-term goal and divide it into medium- and short-term goals, ensuring the goals are logical and easy to achieve and commit to. It is unreasonable for your daily goal to be “memorize 500 English words in 24 hours”; this frightening goal undermines your resolve and makes you feel frustrated if you don’t execute it.
Let’s take a practical example. Your motivation for learning might be expanding your professional network and building successful work relationships with English speakers. The final goal is “to learn, understand, and speak English fluently by the year 2023.” Your medium-term goal could be “to learn 3,000 English words and understand 100 conversations within one year.” Then set small goals like “memorize 250 English words every month,” “learn 30 English words daily,” or “have a conversation with your friend in English every two days.”
Second: Learn the Most Commonly Used Words
Languages contain tens of thousands of words and terms, such as the English language, which includes 600,000 to one million words. There are languages abundant with millions of vocabulary items, like Arabic, whose number of words exceeds 12 million without repetition, according to Arabic language references and dictionaries. Mastering this vast amount of information is difficult. Fortunately, you can master the most commonly used words and understand them well because they form the core aspect of daily conversations.
If you wish to learn English, for example, you should study the 1,000 most common words among native speakers, putting other less used words on the waiting list for now. This is because the most common words make up approximately 90% of English texts and appear in the majority of everyday conversations. Therefore, it’s important to focus your efforts on understanding them first, as they will help you learn the language quickly.
You can rely on the Spaced Repetition strategy at this stage to ensure you memorize words and sentences and don’t forget them. This educational system is a highly effective approach for studying and remembering, and is usually based on using flashcards. In this method, you review foreign words and phrases at spaced, increasing time intervals to recall them before you forget them. The time intervals between repetitions should be gradually increased, leading to better, deeper absorption and understanding of information, and solidifying it in long-term memory.
Third: Understand Grammar
When you start learning foreign words, it is preferable to place them in organized sentences that can be used later, so that you can form phrases by yourself. This process requires understanding grammar because it is a fundamental element in any language and cannot be ignored at all. It enables you to form hundreds of sentences and makes the language more fluid. Fortunately, grammar is often very easy if you study it in the correct way and understand it well.
There are many ways to understand language grammar. The most important include obtaining explanations and training courses online, keeping a grammar book in your pocket, or reading books and articles written in the foreign language. Reading helps you construct phrases, form sentences, delve deeper into the language, and increase your linguistic database. With this continuous exposure to the language, you become able to master grammar.
Fourth: Use the Language Throughout the Day
Using the language daily is no less important than the previous steps. There are many means and ways that make the learning process fun and interesting. For example, you might use educational videos on social media sites like YouTube, listen to radio stations broadcasting in the foreign language, watch a movie, or keep flashcards in your possession to study while commuting or during your free time. It is also possible to download educational games to enjoy the learning process more, as games are one of the best ways to learn languages.
The goal of this is to invest the largest portion of your time in using the language, so it becomes an indispensable daily habit, until you understand everything you hear and are able to recognize letter sounds and how to pronounce them. It also strengthens listening skills and helps you identify the most important and common words and how to use them in a logical and understandable context, getting accustomed to the rhythm of the language and making it a recreational means for relaxation, not a daily burden that spoils your mood.
Fifth: Practice is the Foundation of Learning
Studying alone is not enough to learn new languages. If you do not practice using the language daily and neglect practicing it, you will not achieve any tangible results. Continuous practice of the language and effective training is the essential key to perceiving and absorbing it well. It is easy to memorize the largest number of foreign words and terms, but it can be difficult to use them correctly if you haven’t trained well.
Therefore, experts recommend the necessity of practicing the language in speech and writing with others by conducting conversations via chat applications, holding a video meeting online with your friend who speaks the language you are learning, or joining conversation clubs organized by some institutions. All options are available to you, and you must start practicing the language without procrastination.
Practicing a language requires allocating sufficient time to learn it. The more hours you dedicate to practice and exercises weekly, the greater your understanding of the language becomes. It’s okay to practice for at least 20 minutes, but it is important to commit to this every single day. Be certain that practice makes the learning process faster and more effective, and enables you to discover your mistakes easily, and then work on correcting them. It also helps you use all your senses when using the language, thus improving and strengthening memory and reducing the forgetting of vocabulary.
Sixth: Continuously Evaluate Performance
As long as you have set goals to achieve, you must measure their results and evaluate your performance. You can take some tests periodically to motivate yourself to learn the language and determine the extent of your progress. The internet is full of many training tests in various languages, and you can review exercises in textbooks and external books. It is essential to set a firm plan for conducting tests monthly and annually; this is one of the most important methods that helps you consolidate information in your mind and retrieve important words from memory.
During this stage, you can receive immediate feedback from your friends and colleagues. Their comments should be taken seriously and invested in developing yourself and strengthening your linguistic repertoire. If someone draws your attention to mistakes you make during reading, speaking, writing, or listening, you must know how to correct them and reinforce the correction in your mind with more exercises and tests so you don’t fall into them again.
If you are one of those aspiring to learn new languages remotely, you can do so by using the language learning services provided by Khamsat, the largest Arab marketplace for buying and selling micro-services, which includes a group of professional teachers and specialists in teaching various languages for all levels.
Tools That Help with Language Learning
There are many tools and applications that facilitate the process of learning languages, building vocabulary, and forming sentences and phrases so you become an articulate speaker of the foreign language you are learning. What distinguishes these digital tools is their ease of use and download onto smartphones or desktop devices, in addition to the fact that most of them are free applications that rely on interactivity and effective educational methods for learning and understanding languages. Below are some educational applications and programs through which you can learn a new language in the fastest time:
- Duolingo App
The Duolingo application is one of the most prominent tools that help learn many languages in a fun and interesting interactive way. It is an educational platform that can be accessed for free via various types of computer devices. Some scientific research indicates that the Duolingo program has a positive impact on learners of new languages. In a study on the effectiveness of Duolingo on students, conducted on 340 app learners who completed half of the app’s content in the Spanish or French languages, it was found that their performance in reading and listening skills was at the same level as university students who had taken 5 semesters of classes. - Memrise App
If you are looking for ways to learn a new language, the Memrise application is one of the enjoyable methods for learning languages. It presents foreign content in a fun style and offers different levels of languages suitable for all users. It includes enjoyable educational games that make the learning process smoother. It also features lessons supported by video clips of local native speakers. The program allows speaking during exercises to master pronunciation and conversation, a feature also available in the Duolingo app. It includes various languages such as Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Arabic. - Mondly App
The Mondly platform enables learning more than 40 languages through distinguished training courses designed by language experts around the world. This application enjoys many features, such as the ability to correct users’ pronunciation of words, the inclusion of multimedia to provide a smooth learning style, an enjoyable interactive approach for the learner, in addition to understanding grammar and learning more than 5,000 words. - Busuu Platform
The Busuu platform defines itself as:
“The world’s largest social network for language learning”
It provides learners with a free version and a paid version to allow lessons without an internet connection, watching grammar-related lessons, and other features. The platform offers educational courses supporting 12 different languages and has a mobile app that can be downloaded on the iOS operating system used for all Apple devices, or phones that rely on the Android system. The program allows communication with real speakers to learn languages worldwide.
- Rosetta Stone App
The Rosetta Stone application is one of the most prominent language learning programs and an important tool that can assist you when learning a new language from scratch to professionalism. It relies on an effective method proven successful in learning new languages, as it connects real-life situations and images of objects with common words and phrases in the language. It contains a voice training feature to hone speaking skills and enables you to improve your pronunciation of the language through the speech recognition feature known as TruAccent. - FluentU App
If you are one of those who prefer learning a language through real-world video clips and enjoyable real experiences, the ideal choice is the FluentU application. This app contains many lessons for learning different languages, supported by entertaining video files, music videos, visual news, and movie scenes. By seeing how conversations take place between native speakers of the language and their correct use of words, you can understand the language faster and better. - Anki Program
The Anki system for learning languages relies on the spaced repetition method to memorize words and lessons in your memory for the longest possible period. It is an open-source program that you can download on your smartphone or use on your personal computer. It provides more than 80 million flashcards for adding difficult words and phrases you may encounter while learning a new language, and determining their difficulty level and repetition times. Then, the program allows you to review them at the appropriate time before you forget them, thereby achieving more progress and improving your language skills. - HelloTalk Program
Many people face a dilemma when learning a new language: the inability to reach native speakers to practice the language with them. Fortunately, technological development has provided many tools to accomplish this task, including the HelloTalk application, which includes more than 30 million users from various parts of the world and supports more than 150 foreign languages. Through it, you can conduct text, voice, and video conversations with native speakers, thereby delving deeper into new cultures and making language practice a daily social habit. - Forvo Dictionary
Do you suffer from pronouncing words incorrectly? Well, here is the comprehensive electronic pronunciation dictionary, Forvo, which was launched in 2008 with the aim of improving the process of learning different languages and pronouncing them correctly. You can download it on your phone or use it directly via desktop computers. It is one of the best ways to learn a new language, and is the largest online pronunciation library in the world, for pronouncing words and sentences in multiple languages. It contains millions of pronounced vocabulary items in more than 430 languages. Time magazine ranked it among the top 50 electronic platforms in 2013. - BBC Languages Platform
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) offers a huge free educational service via the BBC Languages platform for learning more than 35 different languages. BBC Languages offers countless lessons, supported by multimedia, games, video clips, entertaining stories, TV programs, and audio recordings from native speakers. Language learners can increase their linguistic repertoire and benefit from it in the learning process.