It is the world's fourth-most spoken language. In terms of its popularity, Spanish shows no signs of slowing down, with the total number of speakers increasing steadily over the past decade. A recent report published by the British Council ranked Spanish as the most important second language for British citizens to learn, placing it ahead of French, Arabic and Mandarin. Compared to many other languages, Spanish is fairly straight forward for an English speaker to pick up, as long as you are willing to put the effort in. The language does not require students to learn a completely new alphabet and there is less emphasis on tone than many of the Asian languages.