[thiagoharry]

Well, the good part is that more people speaks Chinese than English. Less people will suffer with language barriers to knowledge.

[jcranmer]

> Well, the good part is that more people speaks Chinese than English. Less people will suffer with language barriers to knowledge.

That's actually not true. More people speak Mandarin as a first language than English (which is third, behind Spanish as well). However, far more people speak English as a second (or third) language than do as a first language, so that English is actually the most widely spoken language.

[thiagoharry]

The relevant in my comment is the first language.

English is popular as second language just because english is at the present moment the language with more access to documentation and resources, so more people needed to learn it to defeat language barriers. If in the future the language with more resources became Mandarin, more people will learn it as a second language.

[jhgb]

1) Speakers of Chinese are definitely not as equally distributed among global places with the need to access that knowledge as speakers of English.

2) Even if they were as equally distributed, you'd still be wrong about the number of speakers.

[krastanov]

For those like me that thought this is wrong because of how big India is: according to the last census, only around 15% speak English as first/second/third language.

[girvo]

Though your intuition is correct: the amount of English speakers outnumbers that of Mandarin, but Mandarin significantly outnumbers English in terms of native-language speakers

[melesian]

The number of English speakers (in correct English).

Amount is for uncountable nouns, like butter, sugar etc.