For economic reasons, it was once fashionable to learn Russian, then Japanese. Today, the equivalent language is Chinese. The world is converging to English, but I can see Chinese being much more useful than Japanese or Russian ever was.
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What about, say German then? While population probably 1/9 or 1/10 the Chinese, looks like 11x the income, but also a lot higher percentage probably speak English
Yeah, exactly what i was going to say. Too many Germans speak fluent English. Even immigrants to Germany may even end up speaking English before they speak good German.