Hi, everyone.
Being as curious as I am, I've spent an inordinate amount of time doing some completely unscientific "research" on italki to find which countries, or, should I say, native speakers of which languages have a high interest in learning Spanish. To this end, I wrote down the number of different people who wrote notebook entries in Spanish during the last month, whose native language is: French, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Hindi and German. I omitted English because it's way too obvious that native English speakers make up the bulk of people interested in learning Spanish. I wanted to find outliers among the rest.
My finding is:
For native speakers of most languages, the numbers are too low. In some cases, nobody from those languages wrote anything in Spanish during the last month. However, I did find two groups with a relatively high interest:
16 native Mandarin speakers wrote entries in Spanish during the last month
37 native Russian speakers did the same
Since the number of native Mandarin speakers in the world is almost 6 times the number of native Russian speakers, this means the relative number of native Russian speakers interested in learning Spanish is around 13 times that of native Mandarin speakers.
MUTUAL LOVE?
Now, let's find out if native Spanish speakers reciprocate this interest. Is the love mutual?
Among native Spanish speakers:
8 wrote entries in Mandarin during the last month
5 did the same in Russian.
Since the number of native Mandarin speakers in the world is roughly twice the number of native Spanish speakers, it means the love is quite reciprocal in this case. Native Mandarin speakers show roughly the same interest in learning Spanish as native Spanish speakers show in learning Mandarin.
Now, for Russian, the picture is quite different: The number of native Spanish speakers is about 2.4 times the number of Russian speakers, but the number of native Russian speakers who wrote entries in Spanish is 7.4 times the number of native Spanish speakers who did the same in Russian. This means native Russian speakers show about 17 times more interest in learning Spanish than native Spanish speakers show in learning Russian. It is my humble opinion that we, native Spanish speakers, could do a bit more to reciprocate this interest... by starting to learn Russian.
