Is Japanese your first, second or third foreign language?

It’s my fourth language and third foreign one :slight_smile: (All three foreign languages being English, German, and Japanese, in that order)

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My native language is Swedish. English is my first foreign language, although I kind of “cheated” by moving to the US at age seven and staying there for three years, which made it a lot easier to learn.

I took four years of French in school, but unfortunately I don’t remember much. I try to read and listen to French materials every now and then just to keep from forgetting it entirely, including some Japanese learning materials for French-speakers, but I really need more practice with actually using it. Hopefully, once the pandemic is over, I can go to France for a few weeks and pretend I don’t speak English.

I started learning Klingon in high school, which I suppose is foreign both from an in-universe perspective (being native to Qo’noS) and from a production standpoint (being made up by a guy in the US). It helped reignite my love of languages at a time when it had been beaten out of me by French verb conjugation tables and weekly vocab quizzes, and if not for that I’m not certain that I’d be learning Japanese now.
Also, much to my surprise, I’ve had much more use for it than I have French :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve taken a stab at many more languages, but Japanese is the fourth I’ve studied seriously and for an extended period of time.

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English is my first foreign language, and I have studied both Spanish and Italian in the past, but I am nowhere close to speaking either of those two… so I guess I’ll count Japanese as my second foreign language for now.

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Italian is my native language. Japanese is my third foreign language after English and French.

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Dutch is my native language. I learned English first, then in school had to take German and French. Took Latin for two years. Essentially Japanese is my third language as that has stuck along better.

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Spanish is my native language, learned english through self study and from school. Started learning japanese completely on my own, and also makes it my second foreign language.

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It took me a while to realize how complicated this question might be ^^". Technically, my third foreign language, but I kind of count English as 1.5 and my German is so bad that it hardly amounts to 0.5 of a foreign language :stuck_out_tongue: . Not to mention the 6 months of feeble attempts to learn French…

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As many of you, I studied a second foreign language at school; German in my case. But since I never followed through, the little I learnt I already forgot a long time ago, so I don’t consider it a language I’ve studied at all. Also specially when it was something that was mandatory and not started by my own interests (although I liked it anyway). English, on the other hand, I kept studying and practising until today. So because of that, I consider Japanese my second foreign language. And hopefully not my last :stuck_out_tongue: .

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Japanese is definitely an irrational number between 3 and 4(+1). Having mixed 1/13th greek, the square root of latin, one over the power of german, a limit approaching english, a snub of spanish and three slices of french.

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Well, I took Latin in school, so I’m counting this as my first foreign language because it’s the only one that still exists lol

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So, do we only count languages we are able to speak/understand at least a little bit, or all the languages we ever studied somewhat seriously?

First case, my native language is Finnish, then I learned Swedish, then English, then Japanese. Oh, but does Swedish even count as foreign when it’s an official language here in Finland? Not everyone can speak it thou, so being fluent is quite an advantage.

I have also studied French (5 years! Didn’t stick at all!), Russian and Latin (cannot understand anything anymore), and I understand reasonably well written Norwegian and Danish (because they are so close to Swedish).

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Japanese would be probably my fourth? Mother tongue is Spanish, with Catalan (not foreign, though) learnt at school. Then English and German. I’ve also studied Italian and Chinese. In Italian I can understand almost everything and I can hold a conversation but to do so I usually use a lot of my spanish and catalan since there is quite mutual intelligibility. My chinese has mostly disappeared (and the level I reached was super low anyway), though the few Hanzi I manage to remember have helped me a tiny bit here. And now there’s Japanese, but until now mostly Kanji and a little grammar.

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Native language is Danish. My father is Dutch, so I know a bit of that as well. We moved to greenland when I was young, so I got some Greenlandic as well. School taught me English, Swedish/Norwegian and German. Japanese is my own little passion project.

But some of these languages are very similar. Danish/Swedish/Norwegian are very similar. Dutch and German are somewhat similar as well, so learning one when you know the other is easier than starting from scratch.

I’m only really fluent in Danish and quite comfortable in English. I USED to be fluent in Greenlandic since children learn languages as easily as they breathe, but I’ve since forgotten everything except a few words.

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My first foreign language at school was Swedish, followed by German, English and Russian, about Russian I don’t sadly remember much any more).
After school have studied some French and Spanish. My Spanish is not so brilliant, but can cope with reading French books. And now Japanese, quite slowly but there’s still some hope i guess.

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That was quite fun to read.
I am probably the only arabic native speaker here lol. in this post at least though i have seen in an another post there was one lurking around here
Learned english through school and self study.
Started japanese almost year and half ago. the rest is history …

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For those of us in the West I’d have to think it’s relatively uncommon for Japanese to be a first foreign language. In the US the predominant language you’re exposed to in school is Spanish, I’m sure plenty of Canadians learn French in addition to English, and I’d imagine those in Europe often learn English and other Europeans languages. Maybe I’m wrong.

In any event for me, I had quite a bit of Spanish in K-12, then a couple semesters of Italian in college, then years Japanese is my first language on my own or 3rd foreign language overall.

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Japanese is my fifth foreign language. My native language is Bulgarian. I speak fairly well French, English and Spanish and not so well Russian (mostly for lack of practice, otherwise I have a good knowledge of it). I decided to learn Japanese out of curiosity as a completely different languge from those I know.

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when i decided i wanted to learn a language, i just went through all the duolingo languages and decided on dutch because…easy? the most ik is ik been en mann, if i’m even spelling that right lol. then i realized i didn’t like dutch and just picked japanese because of those feel so good guys on agt. when japanese got too hard cause i understood nothing, i switched to mandarin for some reason i’ll never understand, and the same thing happened. i realized duolingo wasn’t gonna work because i didn’t learn a thing from japanese or mandarin, so i looked up language learning apps on the app store and found babbel. i thought it would be a good idea to try german and i got a whole six month subscription. needless to say i hated it so much so i cancelled as soon as humanly possible. after that i kinda backed away from language learning. recently i though that maybe i could try again and i pretty much searched the entire internet for resources. i decided on korean and found some good resources. i tried duolingo again but…just no. soon i had learned how to read and write the script before i remembered that japanese was a thing. of course i switched immediately because…japanese…and now i’ve forgotten a good amount of korean. but it’s all good because now i’m learning japanese. i think my intro covers everything else, but back on topic: i count none of those other languages as being learned by me—i couldn’t tell you anything except what i’ve written here about any of these languages except japanese. so japanese is my first and only foreign language, i don’t wanna distract from it. and i’m here now, cool

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i’m kinda like @Joeni in a way except for my tiny attention span

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You overestimate my attention span!

Typing this while playing Hearthstone and watching Netflix

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