1. Chinese (Mandarin) : around 850m to 1300m depending on the local languages strength
2. Hindi (all dialects) : around 760m (if 42% of Indians rate is stable)
2. French : 715m (official prediction, but highly depends of literacy rates improvements in French-speaking Africa)
4. Spanish
5. English
6. Arab

Chinese will be strong but it is not competing against English for international language status, it is competing against occident as a whole, as it is far easier to occidentals to learn English than Mandarin. Occidentals are more populous than Chinese, so it will depend on other Asian countries to tend to learn English or Mandarin, I see them learning Mandarin because China is closer geographically and culturally, and English is an exotic language to them, they’ve never been able to learn it correctly. This battle is kind of the telenovelas of the future years to come, passioning.

For Hind, I doubt it will match Mandarin, except if the 42% ratio of Hindi speakers in India goes up and becomes a real national language, which is far from that currently.

French may be big, it is currently the second most important language in the world in terms of culture (second Wikipedia in terms of content after English) and most learned language in the world after English, but its growth depends heavily on Africa’s development, and in 2050 will Africa be fully developped ? I’m not sure..

English : should grow demographically and economically, but less than the rest of the world, English domination reached its peak and never go up again.

Spanish has the potential to beat English, but it could take too long before Mandarin takes the lead.

Arab… hum, I still don’t know if we can consider it as a language or several languages/dialects. Its wiki stats are currently under the other major languages (2.5 less users than French or German, and 2.8 less traffic than Portuguese), but it the language that has the best growth rate with Russian… So, that’s a mistery too me if the Arabic langue will be important or not.

German : demography will be weak and they don’t have colonies, so I don’t think German will ever be important again, even if currently they’re reputed (industry).

Same for Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Italian…

1. If the combining has helped me learn the whole thing, then the whole thing is distilled out
2. If the combining has helped me learn one part but not the other, then I distill the part which I did know and see if I can recombine rest with another word or group.
3. If the combining hasn’t helped me learn yet and there are other recombinations available, I might swap elements between combinations
4. Or if the combining didn’t help but there are no other swap options, then I keep it in and hope another writing of it will stick.