I came across a very suspicious statistic this morning that there were only 200,000 speakers of Japanese as a second language: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_languages\_by\_total\_number\_of\_speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers) (under “Ethnologue 2023” the column labeled “second language (L2) speakers”). The link to the source at the bottom of the wiki page is less than helpful. When sorted, Japanese comes in at the 34th most common L2 language (after Vietnamese).
This sub has 626k learners itself. Duolingo has 74 million monthly active users and their #5 most popular language is Japanese. EDIT: According to [this](https://www.jlpt.jp/e/statistics/archive/201602.html) there were 30k N1 passers of the December 2016 JLPT (and you can confirm [here](https://www.jlpt.jp/e/statistics/archive.html) (click on ‘details’) that that is a pretty standard number of N1 passers per test which should make 600k N1 passers in the past decade alone) END EDIT. My first thought is that Ethnologue is just wrong (and not just wrong, but wrong in a massive way). But is it possible that there are only 200,000 L2 Japanese speakers and that learners are just incredibly unsuccessful at learning Japanese? Do you have any other explanations for this seemingly absurd number?
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15 comments
Probably as a third language? I can imagine most people are likely to have English as their second language (for work). And English speakers would have their mother tongue as their second language (with family and maybe friends).
I’m not sure where the number comes from, probably how L2 speakers are defined on Ethnologue. But I am going to say that most people who have done Duolingo and certainly most people subscribed to this sub are not “speakers” of Japanese, they are just “people with some amount of Japanese”.
Japanese learners *are* overwhelmingly unsuccessful, that much is true.
But at least in my case (and I know many others) Japanese is actually my fourth language, and I know it’s many people’s third too. So all in all, it’s probably a combination of weird definitions of second languages and lack of success learning the language.
Duolingo stats are problematic for a bunch or reasons, but let me just say, even if there were a billion Duolingo users, I don’t think I’d believe that that would change the increase the percentage. Duolingo isn’t what I would call a path to fluency, just a good starting/refreshing point.
The number does seem low though. I’d imagine there would be close to a million Japanese descendances who are fluent in the US alone.
If I had to guess, this number is probably based around the amount of people that can pass something like the JLPT N3. People who have picked up Japanese as a hobby or from their parents might struggle there.
That honestly probably sounds right for the most part.
Japanese is only used in Japan, and even then MANY people who move to live there don’t end up ever learning a ton of Japanese if they live in the city.
Plus to actually reach native -like levels is hard and that’s what L2 means. The abbreviations L1 and L2 are meant to describe languages you have essentially full acquisition of, not something you’re actively learning or studying.
Seems about right to me? During the pandemic so, so many people I know started learning languages. I’m the only one that actually sticked to it and made it far.
I’d wager something like 1% of this sub’s total member count actually achieved japanese fluency, based on my own anecdotal experience. Maybe even less than 1% lol.
It takes a lot less effort to subscribe here than to attain a significant level of Japanese competency.
I would actually say that very few actually get to the N1 JLPT level (the highest level). Whether it’s only 200k outside of Japan, though, I’m not sure. But it could be right. I’m not sure where you live, but how many non-Japanese people have you met outside of Japan with whom you be able to have complicated Japanese conversations (assuming you knew they had studied Japanese in the first place)? Probably not many aside from in Taiwan and a few other places, I think. So it might be right.
I could be wrong here, but I think the discrepancy is from the definition of Second Language vs Foreign Language.
I think for most people, they fall under the Foreign Language category rather than the 2nd language category. There’s a nuanced difference there, but 2nd language seems to imply that you frequently speak that language just as much as your native language due to the social environment.
In that sense, 200k is more understandable. There’s probably not that many people who regularly speak both their native language *and* Japanese, as there probably aren’t many social environments that allow for that.
What qualifies someone as an “L2” speaker is already highly suspect and I checked out wiki’s source ([https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/](https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/)) and didn’t see any qualifying information, at least not without paying for it. According to [the wikipedia article on Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language#Non-native_study),
>As of 2015, more than 3.6 million people studied the language worldwide, primarily in East and Southeast Asia.[57] Nearly one million Chinese, 745,000 Indonesians, 556,000 South Koreans and 357,000 Australians studied Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions.[57] Between 2012 and 2015, considerable growth of learners originated in Australia (20.5%), Thailand (34.1%), Vietnam (38.7%) and the Philippines (54.4%).[57]
This information is obviously out of date, though.
One of the things I find suspect is that passing N1 of the JLPT doesn’t necessarily imply fluency according to some of the testimonies I’ve seen on this sub. But also, many learners do not pursue the JLPT so its statistics are more likely than not a significant underestimation of the number of proficient if not fluent Japanese speakers. But even considering that, many people significantly below N1 level are able to be conversational in Japanese.
So it doesn’t really matter how they counted the number of L2 speakers because it’s always going to be an underestimation and it might not exactly be an incredibly meaningful number in the first place depending on what your own criteria is.
L2 is different from jlpt2 or even jlpt1
L2 are apeakers of a language that is not their native one but they are competent users.
Many people who passed the jlpt2 have said that their ability to hold a casual conversation is just not present.
I am not sure how they determine the L2 level of the people on the world and put a number on it.
But given that it is a language that is very hard to master, it is not unthinkable that 200K sounds right.
Given, Japanese is my 3-4th language. English is my 2nd. I learned some German and lived in Germany, but I’ve been learning Japanese on and off since my teens. So maybe it’s just not a 2nd language for most. I’d think English as L2 makes a lot of sense but even Indians will likely know different languages before they name English as their other language. And those numbers you got, that’s still a small portion of the world.
Well, I looked up the number of foreign nationals living in Japan (2.8 million) and found the most randomly sampled language related survey I could [here, sorry for the pdf](https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/001377400.pdf)
That one surveyed a couple thousand foreigners living in Japan (survey in eight languages) on a bunch of things including language. 80% say they can at least do the bare minimum to function, about 50% say they can participate in long conversations, and 20-25% can “converse freely about a wide variety of subjects.” Similar proportions in the hardest category when they asked about reading, and 27% chose to take the survey in Japanese out of the eight options.
Which would suggest that about a quarter of the 2.8 million (so 700k) meet a pretty high proficiency bar even before you start counting the ones outside Japan.
I’m guessing the 200k is way underestimated. Probably because there’s not a ton of comprehensive census type data on L2s in every country.
If we assume that the number comprises only the people that are able to live their lives speaking Japanese as a primary language despite it not being their native language, this number seems right to me. Of course, if the number is “able to pass N1” then it does seem way too small.
Awhile back I remember having the impression that N1 had a lot of obscure vocab and business-only grammar that was too obtuse for me to bother with it, and yet out of curiosity I looked up a practice test the other day and found somehow, over the years, it had become extremely straightforward to me. Even things I didn’t know well enough to use myself were obvious based on context and instinct. I’ve had a couple hundred hours worth of conversations entirely in Japanese on a wide variety of (surface level) topics.
There are probably lots of people who would love to be at my level or would even think I’m fluent by hearing me talk. But during those hundreds of hours of conversations, while I learned to say most anything I wanted, I know it’s not all exactly natural or how a native would say it. And there are a ton things in daily life that I would have no idea how to say or do in Japanese. If I wanted to send a professional or formal email I could (and I have), but I’m very slow, and careful, and I have to often look things up to make sure I’m using certain phrases naturally. What takes me a few minutes to write would take a Japanese colleague a few seconds. My reading is good enough to read a light novel… but hardly a page goes by without either a phrase, word, or way of using a word, that I’ve never seen before. I read slowly, require huge amounts of concentration.
I did a vocabulary assessment and it put me at around 16-17k words if I remember correctly. That’s a lot, and I get a lot of mileage out of that vocab. And yet compared to native speakers it’s like I’m a kind of slow child.
It’s very easy to underestimate how much knowledge and work it is to attain actual fluency in a language as difficult as Japanese. I have a high level of proficiency, and while colloquially I would say “I speak Japanese” to somebody, if we’re being strict about definitions I would not count myself among the world’s population of fluent L2 speakers, assuming the standard is “You are comfortable navigating daily life in your L2 as your L1”.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong aiming for a certain level of proficiency instead of expertise, but I think it’s valuable to be realistic about what expertise actually means as well.
EDIT: I wrote all this but now that I read [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/18zaemk/help_my_small_brain_understand_this_surprising/kggu7ij/) I’m going to reassess. I think using duolingo users, N1-passers, and subscribers here is way overestimating, but I do think the PDF linked there is compelling enough to say reasonably that the 200,000 is a bit too low, even assuming a lot of the people on the survey are exaggerating or there are issues with the sampling. Just among people living in Japan I have to imagine the fluency rate is above 7% (though again, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still a low percentage).
> This sub has 626k learners itself.
Almost all of the subscribers here were curious about Japanese, tried it for a short period of time, said it was too hard, then gave up and left without unsubscribing. Look how slow this sub is. People who have actually learned enough to be well rounded enough in all four fields to be considered as actual L2 speakers, able to navigate themselves through life using Japanese as a below-average L1 Japanese adultcould, and not a tourist / Jet teacher stumbling through 50+% of their interactions with excessive pantomime and circumlocutions ever sentence, are in the very low single digit percentage.
> Duolingo has 74 million monthly active users and their #5 most popular language is Japanese.
The amount of people currently using Duolingo and at the level I describe before are a rounding error of 0%, and some amount of them are probably L1 Japanese speakers reverse going through the course because they want to see the L2 language.