Hedonologist

Indeed I do. 'lol' has almost replaced the full stop for me when sending text messages. I'm not sure if It's 'overusing' it or whether it's just because of it being general internet slang.

It would be a tough choice between perfecting my dutch (my best 2nd language) or starting Chinese. Ideally I would want to speak Dutch, German and Chinese (along with my native English).

One program I used once let you keep track of exactly how many words you knew in a given language. This was based on having learnt the word and being able to recall/use it with a minimal level of error. But with that aside, does anyone keep an approximate record of how many words they know in a given language?

'Before you know it' is a great application for vocabulary. It's basically a flashcard program, but the most user friendly I've come across. I used to use it for dutch but I am now using it for german aswell. http://www.byki.com/

I would say speaking as it requires both the most effort and most confidence. reading is easiest as seeing a word will often remind you of its meaning, when when you are trying to compose a new piece of text it may have slipped your memory.

Native speakers will always have the best fluency, but as they don't need to study the grammar to get by, it may not always be perfect (although most native speakers study grammar in school)

Yes, and mine did. It seems strange that Spanish was prioritised over German in my school (in the UK) as German would be more useful here. Also it's simply traditional to learn french in the UK so that took priority over all else.

Very unlikely, merely because English has the status quo, and therefore it will be hard to change. Even if/when china has more influence that the anglosphere, the fact that so many people use it as a second language mean that the combined populace of the English speaking world will outweigh that of the native Chinese.

Has anyone else used to series 'Chinese in steps'? It is a 4 volume textbook series and I find that it has been very useful in helping me learn Chinese, especially written. It has 20 words per lesson, equating to 200 per book and 800 over the series. I found that this was a very good course for beginners.

I'm surprised what I think is the most common one hasn't been mentioned want = because

I'm sure many native English speakers, that learn Hindi will find that when they speak to native Hindi speakers they seem unusually formal, because so many Hindi speakers use English words frequently in their speech. Even in another thread one poster mentioned how 'namaste' is being replaced by hello/hi. If I where to say 'namaste' to a young Hindi speaker they would probably think it strange and be aware I am a learner. To avoid seeming overly formal, is there a set of words where I should just use English, as the native Hindi speaker would use it as well?