I've wondered about this because I'm the typical college educated American who has taken a language in school but has lost most of it and never got any fluency.
The intro says no to Chinese(for reason related to writing it and the difficulty of getting basic verbal fluency, but one interesting one is people are losing their ability to write Chinese without computers helping), but French, or maybe Spanish. I'm quite surprised at French (which I took in HS and college). Spanish is what makes sense for western hemisphere people.
It doesn't come to a useful conclusion. I wanted it to be spanish.
The intro says no to Chinese(for reason related to writing it and the difficulty of getting basic verbal fluency, but one interesting one is people are losing their ability to write Chinese without computers helping), but French, or maybe Spanish. I'm quite surprised at French (which I took in HS and college). Spanish is what makes sense for western hemisphere people.
It doesn't come to a useful conclusion. I wanted it to be spanish.