[FractalLP]

Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe.

[simongray]

There's no chance that Mandarin will ever take the position of English and that statement is solely based on the peculiarities of the written language, not even the seeming lack of interesting content produced in Mandarin (comparatively tiny Korea and Japan are much bigger cultural exporters than China and Taiwan).

Chinese is only really spoken in any capacity as a second language in countries that used to use Chinese or Chinese characters for the written language (Korea, Japan, Vietnam) and countries where ethnic Chinese people currently live. If you did not grow up looking at Chinese characters and speaking a language that has a big lexical overlap with Chinese (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese) then Chinese is extremely difficult to learn. The writing system is incredibly impractical since it requires learning thousands of symbols to read any normal piece of text and the lack of spaces makes parsing many basic sentencse very challenging until the learner is at a very high level (must know all characters in sentence, must know most words in sentence, must know general grammatical flow in sentence).

The coming of electronic dictionaries and Pinyin IMEs has made it much easier to learn Chinese than it used to be, but it is still ridiculously challenging. Many learners living in China simply skip learning how to read, which I don't think happens with many other languages. Chinese people are often functionally illiterate and even educated Chinese have trouble reading certain things (names, especially). There's a very well-known essay in the Sinologist community about all of these challenges: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[mtgx]

> Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe

English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is that it's not the official language of the countries).

Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools now, so I find it very hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India) where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's going to change much.

[kk58]

Except singapore and taiwan no other country has mandarin as its national language. Infact more countries have tamil and hindi (ex british colonies) than mandarin. Food for thought

[skriticos2]

I grew up with Esperanto as one of my birth languages - yet I'm writing this reply in English. So yes, I agree - English is the more practical contemporary language as you can communicate with more people with.

[arnvald]

I'd be really surprised if Mandarin reached such status not only in 20 years, but in the next 100 years. While it certainly gets more popular due to China's growth as an economic power, its far behind English when it comes to number of non-native speakers.

On top of that, learning Mandarin is very difficult. It's a tonal language - as someone who has absolutely no ear for music, I find it challenging to understand the differences between different tones. The alphabet is another obstacle - even in China children at school learn words written in pinyin (system of writing Chinese characters in Latin alphabet) first. Even with China becoming an economic world leader, I don't see Mandarin becoming mainstream (having said that, I learn it and I enjoy it, although it takes me much, much longer than to learn any other European language)