Steve Rubel talks about reading some French blogs while in Paris, and how only 25% of the content in the blogosphere is written in English. The fact is that the US is still  the country with the most Internet users, but it is very quickly losing ground to China. Bloggers may need to adapt.

Now given that the US is not even an official bilingual country, like Canada is, what can American bloggers do to keep up? Steve suggests that news feed readers/ aggregators could translate content on the fly, but if you’ve seen the results of machine translators, you know that they are not always accurate. What’s more, they are particularly bad at translating colloquialisms, which give the conversational form of a language its current flavour. And since blogs are supposed to be conversational, I’m not sure I’d trust machine translation for more technical blogospheric research. (This is my own personal reason for increasing my language skills.)

What I’m suggesting is that serious onine writers and bloggers should attempt to learn at least one other language than the one they speak fluently. So what languages should English-speaking bloggers learn? Here is my own shortlist, based on what I’m seeing in the blogosphere, plus a few comments for each language. The languages are listed in my own order of importance.

(1) French
(2) Japanese
(3) Spanish
(4) Portguese
(5) German
(6) Mandarin

(1) As a Canadian, I learned French early in my schooling, but without someone to practice speaking with, the best I can do now is read at about a 75-80% ability. I can no longer converse more than a few words, and terribly at that. I do occasionally watch French TV (from Quebec) and understand spoken Quebecois French at about 50-60%. However, I think that there are some very important French-language blogs, particularly from Europe. There is also a list as long as my arm of literary novels that I’d like to read in the original French. Thus French runs high on my shortlist.

(2) I love the sound of the Japanese language and taught myself about a decade ago, so that I could get an interview with the fun Japanese girl-rock band Shonen Knife. I had a great time learning, and fun meeting the band. I’d written out all of my interview questions in Roomaji – the Roman/ English-letter version of Japanese – but promptly forgot all the Japanese I’d learned shortly after greeting the ladies, so the bulk of the interview was conducted in English.

While conversational Japanese is highly phonetic and thus relatively easy for English speakers to learn, there are four different written forms in use. Kanji consists of ideographs that are mostly borrowed from Chinese. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic symbols. Roomaji uses Roman letters (plus accent marks) and numbers to represent Hiragana and Katakana words.

Hiragana is the standard form of written Japanese that you see on packaging and newspapers. Katakana is also used fairly regularly, but mostly for words borrowed from Western languages. I have yet to come across any blogs written in Roomaji. Still, for my own research, Hiragana and Katakana are very high on my list. I do a lot of writing about consumer electronics and computer technology in general, and since a great deal of tech is manufactured in Japan, it would be to my advantage to know Japanese more fluently.

(3), (4) In my blogspheric surfing, I’m seeing an increase in both Spanish and Portguese blogs. There seems to be a particular increase in Brazilian blogging, and thus Portuguese blogs. I know a smattering of Spanish and can tell the difference between written Spanish and Portuguese, but I don’t know enough to know the top bloggers in these two languages. Still, there are many classic novels originally written in Spanish that I’d like to read, so at least Spanish ranks high on my list. If I can read a few more blogs because of it, then great. And learning Spanish helps in learning Portgueuse, if you can tell the difference between them.

(6) Germany has long been a leading center of technology, like Japan, and I’ve tried to learn German in the past. At present, it’s relatively low on my list, but that may change. There are a number of German research institutes that have websites which I’d eventually like to be able to read in the original German.

(6) Mandarin is a very hard language to learn, even for someone like myself who has a penchant for languages. There are up to 11 different inflections for vowel (consonant?) sounds. I tried learning Mandarin two years ago because I was seriously considering teaching English in China, particularly Beijing. It’s the first language I gave up on only after four weeks. (I stuck with Russian, Greek, Italian, and German for much longer.) It’s not currently on my list per se, but one day soon, I think that’ll change, with the rise of Mandarin blogging.

There are of course other languages that have a strong presence online, such as Philipino, but I’m listing only those languages that have a research-based importance to me.

If any of these, or other, languages interest you, these days there are all kinds of free language lessons online. I went to my local public library and borrowed CDs and books. Just make sure that you get CDs which use native speakers, to get the best lessons.

You might think that if you’re just planning to learn a language to read blogs in, it will not be enough. You need to learn the language, or it’ll be very easy to forget what you learn. Aural cues help trigger memory, and unless you’re already fluent in a language, just sticking to reading will likely be a waste of time.