World's Language Learners Show Interest in Japanese
Large numbers of young people in the US are learning Japanese and Korean, according to a new study.
After Spanish and French, Japanese and Korean are the third and fourth most popular languages to learn among English speakers under the age of 40.
A language website called Word Tips looked at the languages that people around the world are learning.
Using data from a language learning platform called Conversation Exchange, they found the most popular languages in the US and across the world.
The data included nearly 48,000 people in the US and more than 280,000 people around the world.
It was found that English is the most widely learned language — it's the most popular language to learn in 52 of the world's capital cities, from Tokyo to Tunis.
Spanish comes next. But according to the study, Japanese is the most learned language among people in Singapore, and also in the Australian capital of Canberra.
It's thought that the increasing popularity of Japanese and Korean culture around the world is part of the reason for the interest in these languages.
But Word Tips says companies in the US are also looking for Japanese speakers.
Apart from Spanish, it's the most learned language in 13 US cities, including Las Vegas, Seattle and Honolulu.
The US government says Japanese isn't one of the easier languages to learn. But according to the Work in Japan website, getting the hang of spoken Japanese is "not particularly difficult" — writing is the hard part.
