Doesn't the chart suggest one should learn Russian only after Spanish, French and Hindi?

Are you able to "get around" in Hindi, Mitch? Please say yes. It's fun to watch JB's head explode.

Gaaah, wouldn't that be cool?

Nope - I know not a word of Hindi, Sanskrit, or Urdu.

Thanks to PJ O'Rourke, I once was able to say "Let us haste to cut their heads off" in Pashto, but I've forgotten. I also once learned how to say "six soldiers are climbing the hill" in Swahili.

Oh, yeah - and to discipline my dog, I whisper "I'm hungry" in Korean. Works every time.

I took a year of Russian in college - it's not the hardest language in the world (that has to go to Mandarin or Cantonese), but the grammar is utterly insane. Word order? Bah, who needs it? Just use a collection of indistinguishable suffixes instead!

Then again, there are no better curses than Russian ones. There's nothing quite like saying that someone can *CENSORED* their mother through seven gates while whistling...

I came out You Should Learn Russian too. Seems kind of odd.

Word order matters? Some languages are pretty fun that way. I really like German since you can usually figure out most nouns, but putting so many verbs at the end of the sentence can make you forget what the point was.

Mine came out Japanese. Strange. I had little desire to learn it while on my trips there, it seemed too little reward for the effort since so many folks spoke English there. But then again, I was there for work so I didn't have much incentive to do much other than get the job done and get home.

Hindi. Actually, that makes sense, though I would have thought Mandarin was next for me. Littlest is much better at picking up Japanese characters than I can ever hope to.