<p>SergioValencia,</p>
<p>Again, this is not true. That, and I never said that only “only people living in CHINA have Mandarin as their native tongue.” You put words in my mouth. </p>
<p>I decided to research this a bit, and here are the best figures I’ve found (from a government source):</p>
<p>“Mandarin is the most widely spoken of all Chinese languages. It is used by 867 million people as a first language in a vast Beijingarea of northern and southwestern mainland China. It is also spoken in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Viet Nam. The total number of first-language speakers of Mandarin world-wide is estimated to be around 873 million. In addition, it is used as a second language by another 178 million people”</p>
<p>Even if we count the users of Chinese as a second language, that means that there are about 1.2 billion or so combined speakers of Japanese and Chinese.</p>
<p>Then again, this is assuming that they are somehow mutually beneficial languages to learn, which they may not be-- Japanese is a very different language from Mandarin. With the exception of writing, which is also fairly distinct, they’re as different from one another as Korean and Thai.</p>