Four Cool Languages
Chinese
Around
1.4 billion people speak Chinese. Chinese is a tonal (声调的) language, meaning that changing the tone of just one syllable (音节) can affect a word's meaning. Chinese writing has ancient roots, which is thought to have developed starting around 2000 B. C.
Arabic
Over 370 million people speak Arabic. Written Arabic uses a cursive-style font (连笔) that looks more like artworks than writing. Arabic is written from right to left rather than left to right, making it different from many other languages.
English
Around 379 million people speak English as a native language. It's an official language in a huge number of other countries.
English is the most widely spoken second language, with over a billion people speaking it as a non-native language. That means around twice as many people speak English as a second language than people who speak it as a first language.
Italian
Nearly 68 million people speak Italian. If you play music or sing, chances are that you already know a lot of Italian because many familiar musical terms are actually Italian.
Not only will learning Italian help you pick up vocabulary, but it will also help you understand the meanings of musical terms in greater depth.