Is Japanese your first, second or third foreign language?

Japanese Language
42

I didn’t really know how to answer that question, I’ve plumped for third, but I really consider myself a monoglot English speaker learning Japanese.

I got an A in GCSE French, that was a while ago, I also got a passing grade in some Latin modules during my masters degree. I also made abortive attempts at Gaelic (Scottish not Irish) classes and German self directed.

I started on duolingo, and if I was going to give up on Japanese, or if I ever complete the modules I suppose I’d go back to Latin.

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43

Half of the people in this topic really be like - “my first foreign language is my native language_name” :slight_smile:

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44

my first language is English, and I am currently studying Japanese (second) and European Portuguese (third) :relaxed: Portuguese gives me a nice reprieve when I’m tired from Japanese, lol!

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45

oh wait, i tried scottish too and then czech (cause my grandpa was czech) and THEN korean, totally forgot about that

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46

Japanese is the fifth language I’ve studied seriously after my main language (English). To clarify, ‘studied seriously’ = ‘spent enough time on the language to learn enough basic grammar to form grammatically correct sentences; read a fair amount e.g. Tweets or news articles on familiar topics that are full of words I can figure out, albeit with help from other languages if need be; and communicate via text, albeit with the help of a dictionary’. In short, more than ‘dabbling’, but not necessarily enough to be completely fluent.

In the order I studied them, the languages I’ve spent quite a bit of time on are English, Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Japanese.

In order of fluency though, they are:

  1. English (native language, main language, use it all the time)
  2. French (started in secondary school, now studying in France, so I use it a lot. I think it surpassed my Chinese a few years ago, at least in terms of technical vocabulary.)
  3. Chinese – Mandarin (semi-native, I guess? I was raised bilingual and started Mandarin at age 6 at the latest, but probably did so quite a bit earlier because I know we had some kiddy hanzi videos lying around. Plus, the earliest hanzi I remember studying in class at school – in kindergarten – is 鼻 at age 6, and I distinctly remember being both fascinated and very comfortable with it. I doubt that would have been the case if it had been my first hanzi though. Mandarin still feels more familiar to me than French, but I rarely have to use it now, so it’s rapidly deteriorating. I probably still know more proverbs in Chinese than in English or French though, and many of them are in Classical Chinese, whereas I don’t know as much Shakespeare or Middle/Old French. The reason I vacillate between ‘native’ and ‘not native’ is that I’ve never needed to live my life in Chinese like people from Chinese-speaking territories, so I probably lack technical vocabulary that would be obvious for someone like that. I don’t speak any other Chinese dialects, but I can understand bits of a few Southern dialects because my mother and grandparents speak them.)
  4. Japanese (started in July 2018. Been spending a lot of time on it, especially by watching anime and looking things up. It also helps that I have a friend studying in Japan who’s fluent.)
  5. German (started in 2014, I think. Finished a textbook during compulsory military service. Never really practised, so I’m not fluent, but I know enough sentence structure basics. I hope to pick it up again within the next two years.)
  6. Spanish (started it at the same time as German: I used to alternate between my German and Spanish textbooks. I can read some news articles, but that’s only because of the similarity to French. I’ve also replied to one or two Tweets in Spanish because the rest of the comments were in English and I figured the guy wouldn’t get an answer any time soon otherwise, but once again, I needed help from French and a dictionary for translations.)

I’ve got a few textbooks for other languages lying around at home (10000km away from where I am now), but I don’t think I’ll touch those until I’ve improved my proficiency in the languages I’ve already tried to learn.

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47

My native language is German. During my time in school, I learned English, French and Spanish, but French and Spanish never truly resonated with me, so to hold a conversation I would have to dig deep inside my memory. Reading is fine, though. That makes Japanese my fourth foreign language :slight_smile:

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48

I answered that it was my second foreign language in the poll, then realized I forgot about Latin! Well, Japanese is my second foreign language that I’m actively still working on, at least. I took Spanish in 8th-10th grade, then took one quarter of Latin in community college, then did nothing else to learn any foreign language for years and years until I randomly got back into Spanish by practicing with Duolingo every day. Currently, my Spanish is still probably at about late beginner level, and my Japanese is still at a very early beginner level, and whatever Latin I knew is almost entirely gone.

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49

German is my native language and I started learning English when I was 4 years old. I had to learn French in school and learned basic Dutch and Swedish because my father used to live in the Netherlands and now lives in Sweden and I don’t like regularly visiting places without being able to communicate in the local language. So Japanese is my fifth foreign language (or third with a very long break until recently, if you count my failed attempts at learning it 10+ years ago).

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50

My native language is Turkish, English is the first foreign language, so Japanese is the second one.

I was always immersed in English some way since childhood, so it mostly came naturally. I don’t really remember sitting down trying to study grammar. Probably my English is not perfect, but now I’m in the US for my PhD, and never had a big problem with English.

Because of that sometimes I get really surprised when I try to learn words in Japanese. It takes quite some effort, and I always find myself thinking “Wait, how did I learn that word in English? When did that happen?”.

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51

Neither.
German native, studied Russian, English and French at school, self-studied Italian and Spanish … that would make Japanese my sixth foreign language. Though English is the only foreign language I speak fluently these days.

52

@Marifly you should perhaps have given us more options on that poll. :eyes: After all, there are polyglots among us.

For Scandinavians like you and me we all have at least 3 languages under our belt after graduating school (and then there’s university to top it off). So, that makes Japanese the 4th language for me personally …But considering that I do comprehend both Danish and Norwegian, I guess, it’s actually my 6th language in a way. Though I don’t speak Danish or Norwegian which complicates things perhaps. ^^;

*I do wanna also comment on your use of “first”. You don’t call a foreign language your first language. It just doesn’t make sense. So, you have your first language/mother tongue and then everything else = 2nd, 4rd etc…

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53

That’s very commendable of you! Not everyone would be able to pull it off. You’re pretty amazing I think! :star2:

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54

I’m Dutch, so that’s obviously my mother tongue. At school we had to learn English, and later French and German. My French isn’t that good anymore so I don’t know if you can count that. I’ve been switching between learning Japanese and Norwegian over the last few years, but since I started doing Japanese first, you could say that it’s my 4th foreign language.

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55

The ordering is something like this:

  1. Dutch (native)
  2. English (fluent but non-native)
    – ^ speak ^ — v don’t really speak but can read v –
  3. German (3 years of high school)
  4. Italian (2 year course)
  5. Spanish (1 year course + read the first 3 HP books in Spanish)
  6. French (6 years of high school)
    – ^ don’t really speak but can read ^ — v struggle to read v –
  7. Japanese (1.5 years self study)
  8. Latin (5 years of high school)
    – ^ struggle to read ^ — v it’s gibberish to me now, but I recognize the alphabet, kind of v –
  9. ancient Greek (1 year of high school)
  10. Russian (1 year course)
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56

Gosh, you spent 15 years in high school?

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57

even if they took them all at the same time that’s still 6 years

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58

besides the 2.5 or 3 languages i speak natively, japanese would be my 4th foreign language which i’ve invested any amount of effort in.

native languages are swissgerman/german, and english.

first foreign language is french (near-native)
then italian (i understand and can read it reasonably well, but not speak)
some latin (i read asterix in latin, but have forgotten much)
and now japanese

i understand quite a lot of spanish, and can read a good amount of dutch, but that’s more of a side-effect from the other languages i know

i also had a good look at sumerian, because my girlfriend at the time was studying sumerian texts for her masters. but i don’t remember more than a handful of signs, and the names of many goddesses and gods…

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59

Had to learn German, Swedish and English pretty much through the whole schooling system. So that makes Japanese my fifth language. I can pretty much understand what German and Swedish is thrown at me but speaking is another thing.

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60

Fourth or fifth for me.

  1. Natively bilingual English/Samoan although English is probably my strongest language by far given my love of f/sf novels throughout my entire life and going through the American school system all the way to university.

  2. Spanish for two years in high school but worked with one Argentinian guy for 5 years and then a Paraguayan for about 6 years and counting so I get a lot of practice. Also spent many, many summers in Southern California.

  3. Mandarin Chinese. Did kind of a boot camp to get ready for training in Guangdong and then spent 6 weeks there. That’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to pure immersion since the training was in the middle of the industrial district and it was an hour’s ride to get to the touristy parts of Shenzhen. Plus, being behind the great firewall meant that I had no social media and very little contact with people back home. I used QQ a lot, though. As such, I managed to pick up an intuitive grasp of tones and still find listening to Mandarin much easier than Japanese.

  4. Japanese for two and a half years now. Listening comprehension and reading are getting much better and I’ll probably spend another 2.5 years on it before focusing back on Mandarin.

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61

Russian, English, Spanish, Japanese

  1. Russian is my mother tongue, but I was born in America so I learned English to a native level very early. Stopped using Russian and now can’t really communicate with it apart from some basic phrases. I tried to relearn it at one point, but its grammar is absolutely ridiculous… each adjective has something like 25 forms (they inflect by number, gender, and case in an unpredictable way).

  2. Learned Spanish in school for many years, taking this years AP Spanish Exam and can comfortably read YA books in it, so I think I would at least get by in a Spanish speaking country.

  3. Started Japanese about a year and a half ago, definitely my favorite so far… Russian has horrifying grammar and Spanish is too similar to English.

I answered SECOND foreign language because I don’t really count English, especially since it’s basically replaced Russian as my native language.

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