Which second language gets you access to the most books?

Besides English, I already speak English and I'm interested in what would be the most useful language to learn.

In other words, which languages both have lively publishing activity and are really good at translating books from other languages, especially books that aren't available in English?

I think I've had a bit too much fun researching this (way too much coffee), and it appears the answer is Mandarin, but I'd still appreciate thoughts. I haven't hit that point where I've fully internalized I will never read all the books, and the idea that there are good books I can't read just bothers me. Even if I'm not actually going to read them I want access to all the books.

As a note, the few discussions I've found on this topic are filled with people recommending languages based on single authors. Learn French to read Proust, learn Russian to read Tolstoy, learn German to read Goethe, etc... while commendable, that is not what I mean by this question at all. (And the answer to that question is obviously learn Spanish to read Borges :). )

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year
Number of books published per year. I don't know how trustworthy these numbers are.
United States = 292,037 books
China & Taiwan = 270,070 books
UK = 149,800 books
Russia = 116,888 books
India = 82,537 books (but how many published in English?)
Germany = 82,048 books
Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, & Bolivia = 80,294 books
Japan = 78,349 books
Iran & Afghanistan = 67,795 books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_popular_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
The most popular languages are Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Punjabi, and German.

I calculated the number of books published per 10,000 people for a bunch of countries, and these are the ratios for the top 20 book publishing countries.

US (9.2), China (1.8), UK (23.5), Russia (8.1), India (0.7), Germany (10.2), Japan (6.2), Iran (8.4), Spain (9.4), Turkey (5.7), France (6.4), Italy (6.7), South Korea (7.9), Poland (8.2), Taiwan (12.0), Argentina (6.6), Vietnam (2.7), Indonesia (1.0), and Brazil (1.0).

I believe among countries that publish more than 1000 books Iceland (47) is the winner. Vatican City publishes more than 1 book per every 4 people.

http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/04/in-2011-one-in-six-books-in-france-was...
France is publishing 1/6 books in translation, including 230 books by Scandinavian authors and 84 books by Chinese authors in 2011.

http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/ein/en8326705.htm
German book market.
10.2% of books published in 2010? were translated from the French, 5.8% from Japanese, 3.2% from Italian, and 2.4% from Spanish.

http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/10/rights-market-in-china-is-booming-but-...
In China in 2011 publishers bought the rights to 15,592 foreign books, but I do not know what percentage of those were actually published.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-new...
In Russia ~13% of books per year are translations?

http://www.newspanishbooks.com/useful-information/spanish-publishing-today
28% of books published in Spain in 2007 translations, 12% of which were from English.

http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/02/why-foreign-bestsellers-often-fail-in-...
In Japan 8% of books sold are translations.

It will really depend on what you like reading - Russian will open the door for a huge amount of books - all types of books (13% translations sounds about right but you need to look at the numbers here - 13% of 1000 titles is one thing; 13% of 10 000 is something else). Same with French. Or Chinese.

If you are looking just for numbers, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French and probably Portuguese will give you the biggest numbers - the most people speaking the languages and so on.

Comparing ratios between countries with very small populations (such as Iceland) and with huge ones (Russia) does not make much sense. :)

Plus - adding a second language does not only give you the books written in that language. It also gives you access to a lot of books translated into it. For example Russian - a lot of the Eastern European books are not translated into any Western language but are translated into Russian. Same with Chinese and Asian books I suspect. So when looking at what you want to choose, that may be a deciding factor - again depending on what you want to read.

The information that a lot of Eastern European books are translated into Russian is exactly what I want to know! It's so hard to search for that kind of thing. I'm not sure if a lot of Asian books get translated into Mandarin or not, but it doesn't look like they are being translated into Japanese.

All the ratios are telling me is that some countries publish more books per person than others. It doesn't answer my initial question, but it does tell me that if the people in Iceland can publish so many books per person, perhaps places like Russia and China have a lot of unreached potential.

I was actually surprised at how poor French and Portuguese were as choices according to the data I have because it contradicts my personal experience. France is high up in the book publishing rankings, but learning French will only get you half as many books as German or Japanese, and around a third as much as Russian. That's a big difference. Portuguese is also commonly spoken, but Brazil and Portugal do not publish a lot of books, relatively.

So, multiplying translation percentages by books published, I get these numbers.

Russia translates around 15,000 books.

Just Spain translates around 12,000 books. Argentina is a major country I cannot find numbers for.

Germany translates around 11,000. (using a 13% estimate, I accidentally gave the numbers for fiction only above)

Taiwan translates around 8,000. (28%). I don't have the numbers for China, but if China translates only 4% of their books, that is around 10,000.

France translates around 7,000 a year.

Japan translates around 5,000.

Brazil translates around 12%, so around 2,500 books.

I'm leaving India out because India is complicated.

Of course these are all really rough estimates. I'm trying to compare different years to each other, the numbers might not be accurate, I'm assuming publishing is constant over time, etc.

As an English, French, Spanish and Japanese reader, my experience is that I've always found a book I wanted translated into French. The amount of translations that come out of France and the QUALITY, foremost, is without comparison, I feel.

Unless a book is originally written in one of the four languages I read above, I will always look to read the translation in French over English.

Now, as for books translated into Japanese? They do translate a lot of books but since there is already a whole lifetime of Japanese books to read, I'm not quite into looking for translations of other languages into Japanese.

So my suggestion? French!

I see from your profile that you are already studying Chinese. If you're going for a reading knowledge only, all the Chinese dialects should be available to you, plus it gives you a leg up on Japanese and Classical Chinese as well.

However, you might also want to look at the time investment. As an English speaker, you can learn to read Spanish very quickly (as opposed to Chinese), and that opens up Italian and a leg up on Latin. And there's lots of good stuff to read there.

The time you spend learning the language is time you are not spending reading ...

To make it a meaningful discussion, I think you'd have to break it down somehow by types of book (what if you learnt Mandarin and it turned out that 90% of the new books published in that language are technical manuals concerning subjects you're not interested in?). At a minimum you ought to break it down into a few big categories like literary fiction, popular genre fiction, and non-fiction.
You'ld have to make some sort of allowance for the "back catalogue" of that language as well. "Learning French to read Proust" might be a rather narrow aim, but for most people the books that already exist in language X are going to count a lot more heavily than those that will be published next year in that language.
And some of those books, depending on your particular interest, will certainly count more heavily than others. As it isn't possible to assess that objectively, maybe you could use the number of books in the national library as some sort of index?

>3 Settings:

I am a native Bulgarian speaker and I read in English and Russian. Between the two, it is very rare not to find the book I want to read (and then there will always be a French edition - as lilisin already pointed out :) )

Again - the most important questions is WHAT you like reading. If you are going for SF for example, Russian will be probably better than French. If you like contemporary stories from around the world - French is a better bet (especially if you have an interest in Africa).

Even more people in support of French! :)

I didn't find any numbers broken down by category, unfortunately, because it would be a lot more useful. I can try searching again when I have more time and I'll have to look into the national library numbers.

I've heard about Russian science fiction before, but I did not know many short stories were translated into French. I know Chinese has Wuxia and Spanish has magical realism, but I am unfamiliar with most of the genres new languages would open up.

Aulsmith, I've been studying Chinese for around 4 years now, for the pathetic reason that it was the only language that fit into my schedule. Too late to go back now, and I wouldn't want to. I'm still nowhere near being able to comfortably read a novel, so I'll have years to consider what language to learn next. It's fun to think about though. It's definitely important to consider how long a language would take to learn. I'm guessing the quickest return for English speakers would be Spanish, French, or German.

>8 Settings:

You will never feel comfortable reading in another language until you actually start reading. So even if it is not a novel, try reading stories - you will be amazed at the progress you will make in your studies.

9 -
I second what Annie is saying. You might think you're learning a language until you actually pick up native material. Only then will that other world open up, but you have to take that leap. No reason to wait till tomorrow.

(Advice from someone who reads in four languages, two native, two learned.)

I finished my first book in Chinese yesterday! :). I do attempt to read things, I'm just a long way away from being able to read anything without a great deal of effort. Thank you both for the encouragement.

It was a light novel for teenagers with an English translation up online. I only looked at the English to double-check, I still read all the Chinese. I have it on a word document (it was up on the author's blog) with a comment on every word I didn't know, and there are 2,167 comments. It took forever.

That's how it was with my first book in Japanese. Took forever but oh was it worth it. I'm still trying to pick up speed with my Japanese reading but knowing that there is so much great literature out there is a great motivator.

And since we're discussing reading in other languages and improving, you should try Tadoku! It's an online challenge to read as much as you can in your second language within a set period of time. During that time you are "competing" with others and you can see your stats. It has done wonders for my Japanese reading plus it's a lot of fun. Here is the actual ranking site (which works via Twitter: the only reason I own a Twitter account).

I joined that, thanks! It looks like a lot of fun. I'll have to read something tonight so I can do better than zero now, which I suppose is exactly the point.

The first book in English took me almost 3 months - the first half was a daily struggle with the dictionary; then it started working better. The second one took couple of weeks. The next one was easier and easier.

I made sure I have no Bulgarian or Russian translation with me (the languages I was reading in at that point) - unless if you find a literal translation, it actually confuses you. And having a translation is easily used as a crutch - you do not understand a sentence, you look it up, you think you understand - the same sentence 3 pages later with a changed word throws you off again.

Different things work for different people. I went for a book I knew I will like (an Agatha Christie I had not read before) and I set myself goals which even if they felt like a chore and homework, I kept. It worked. It is homework in these first books - it becomes real reading later on.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do :) And happy reading!

Reading a book in two languages in parallel paragraph by paragraph will confuse you, but first reading a page in the language you know well, putting it down, and then reading it in the language you are learning, definitely helps rather than hinders.

>15 anglemark:

Or chapter by chapter - yeah.. But not looking up every expression or sentence you cannot figure out...

>15 anglemark:,16
Yes, I find the key thing when reading novels in an unfamiliar language is to keep up the momentum. Guessing wrongly at the meaning is far better than getting bogged down. Most of the time it becomes clear soon enough that you must have got the wrong end of the stick, and then you can pull out the dictionary. I found recently when I had my first go at a novel in Spanish that the built-in dictionary of the ereader is a real boon. It's not so easy to use (unless you have very slim fingers) but it's always there, wherever you happen to be reading.

That seems unintuitive to me, you would think knowing the correct meaning would help rather than hurt, but you guys are accomplished language learners so I will take your word for it. The book I finished was part of a series. I've started the second one and I'll try to avoid looking at the English, but my Chinese really isn't good enough to enjoy the novel at all without it.

And since this completely off topic anyway, I tried to sign up for the Tadoku game, but I messed something up and I can't fix it. Could I possibly get some help?

I'm Guangjianxing on the site and Guangjianxing on Twitter. On the actual Tadoku page I see I show up in the German section and the English section. I must have accidentally signed up for those languages? But I don't know how that happened.

I tried using the Twitter codes to undo everything and then register for Chinese but it doesn't work. I'd get a different account but I don't want to spam the thing. I'm feeling very stupid.

The thing is, you're not looking at the definition of a specific word, you're looking at an entire sentence. When someone translates a work, they're not translating literal word for literal word, they're translating full sentences and paragraphs. So if you try to decipher it as individual words from the translated sentences, it isn't going to work right. Words have more than one meaning, and can be used in more than one way, and the way one sentence uses it and is translated may not be the same way another sentence uses it and is translated. So you're not going to see "the correct meaning" by looking at it that way.

18 -

For any problems with Tadoku, tweet your message to @TadokuBot and he'll fix it right away. Something like the following would work:

@TadokuBot Wanted to sign up for Chinese, somehow am registered for en and de. Help please?

I'm nikonikokuremi on the list. Since I was gone for half a month I only just started last night. Usually though I'm trying to read as much as possible.

>18 Settings:

Don't expect that these first novels will really be reading in the real sense of the world. But using English as a crutch will never allow you to go on your own. Just read small passages, try to understand, THEN lookup the translation and some of the words you do not know(if still unclear). Yes - it sounds a lot more like doing homework than actual reading but this is how you start I am afraid.

Slowly and through time, the passages become longer, the number of words you mark and need to lookup become smaller and smaller and without even realizing, you are actually reading in the language. If you want to just enjoy the novel, read the translation and move on. If you are trying to make your new language available to you, some work need to be done :) Depending on how much Chinese you know, the slow part can take a week or a year - it really does not matter in the long run. :)

>19 .Monkey.: Not to mention that sentences can be skipped, connected or split in the second language. Or a whole paragraph almost turned around if that makes the new language translation better. Add to this idiomatic expressions and the difference in grammar constructs and things get even worse :)

Haha, right. Translation of an instruction manual can probably be done nearly word for word "plug X into Y" and so forth, but for a book it's not literal, it's just as much emotion and style and flow of words etc etc, so things don't work in such a direct correlation. Which is a pain for just starting out, heh, but that's just the way it goes.

Anoplophora -

Looks like you figured it out! And read 20 pages! A good start!

Yes, they helped me out with the registration and works beautifully now.

Thank you guys for the advice again. I'm doing what you suggest (kinda), I'm trying to read longer and longer passages before looking at the English, and I'm not looking at the English at all if everything is making sense.

I was never trying to match every sentence (I know that doesn't work :) ), it's mainly who was speaking and the overall progression of the plot I'm checking.