Champollion

Lilly Evangeline, the beautiful Canadian actress who plays the elf princess Tauriel in The Hobbit Part 2, said that one of the hardest parts of the job was to learn the Elvish dialogues that were frequently given to her just the night before. Tolkien used to invent languages as a child: putting them into his works was obviously fun for him. His stories are inspired by AngloSaxon sagas like Beowulf of the 8th century (which BTW is the oldest story in the English language) so obviously he's going to have a lot of AngloSaxon and Gaelic influence when creating the language of the elves. But it's only his personal creation as part of his sweeping imagination of Middle Earth, it's not a real language that ever existed in histrory.

As an English teacher IMHO a lot of these ideas like writing names on parts of the body and soap operas are good ideas! As long as you have fun and you remember the language then it's working. I had a colleague who had a really wacky system to learn languages, he was on language number 12 when I last heard of him. He travelled around Europe teaching English, one year in each country and read "Lord of The Rings" in the local language! Obviously he often started the book not having a clue what the words meant but picked it up as he went, knowing from before what the story was. Personally I wouldn't recommend this system!

I live in Spain and there are four official languages: Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician. If you want a job in the public sector it's compulsory to be able to speak the official languages of that area. For example a civil servant in Barcelona would have to be able to use both Catalan and Spanish. Language is a touchy political subject in some parts: in Valencia or Mallorca they speak a language very similar to Catalan but they call it Valencian or Mallorqui. While Spanish, Catalan and Galician are Romantic languages (i.e. derived from Latin) the origin of Basque is a linguistic mystery. It's completely unlike Indo-European languages.

The top three are English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, but the order depends on what you mean by "speakers". If you count the inhabitants of countries by official language, then it must be English, principally because India has a population comparable to China and one official language in India is English. Would you consider "speakers" as people with the language as their mother tongue? Again English wins out here, because a lot of people in China and the Spanish world speak local languages such as Kirguizi or Quechwa in their families. In Spain itself for instance 3 million alone have Catalan as their mother language, not Spanish. In countries like the US, GB or Australia the local languages are much more infrequent. This is a pity IMHO, I like linguistic diversity. And if you think "speakers" are people who can speak the language ok but it's not mother tongue, then clearly it's English again. A customer in Denmark phones a supplier in France, what language do they normally speak in? This is the strength of English worldwide, it's the language of business, culture, internet etc. for people who speak it as a second language. So whichever way you look at it, I'd put my money on English having the most speakers.

That's a really difficult question! Dickens was a genius who has created so much pleasure for people of many generations. If I had to choose it would be David Copperfield (it's an autobiography basically). It was a set book for us at school and I just couldn't put it down, something that never happened with any other book they gave us as compulsory homework. It was the BBC's special programme the night of the Millenium back in 1999/2000. Brilliant! Great Expectations is good but the plot's a bit complicated. Miss Haversham is spooky!!

Hi there, Well coming from England and having to suffer the English weather, I'd say my most used idiom is "It's raining cats and dogs" but that wouldn't be my favourite. Idioms of naval origin are my favourite. Maybe " There's not enough room to swing a cat" if I'm on a crowded bus or somewhere like that. Not connected with the cats as animals this one, it refers to the cat-of-nine-tails which was used to punish sailors in the Royal Navy for misdemeanours.