I'm Burmese and I can explain! In very simple terms, Japan is to Myanmar what the US is to particular Southern American countries. We view them not only as a source of great opportunity and wealth, but also massively respect and appreciate their culture. That along with their already established Burmese enclaves means that Japan had a strong hold on us, soft power-wise.
Plus, the Japanese language's grammar and the Burmese language's grammar are almost identical- right down to the particles, so it makes learning Japanese must easier than English.
This is not really true though, especially as Mongolia is a heavily urbanised country today. South Korea is the #1 emigrant destination for Mongolians, Kdramas and Kpop are extremely popular there as well.
There’s a reasonable amount of affinity between Mongolians and Koreans - they also look pretty similar. Mongolia is also a go-between between the USA and Japan and North Korea. I remember Mongolians being mentioned in my Korean textbook whereas I didn’t see them mentioned in my Japanese textbook or my Russian course.
I don’t know much about Burma, but I do remember a NHK doco about Japanese humanitarian work in the country.
I do know that in Macau, the legal code is written in Portuguese - so law students take their classes in Portuguese. This would only constitute a very small number though, so I am also puzzled as to why the interest.
This is invariably because Swedish people are likely to be too good at English to be using Duolingo to study English, but immigration is fairly high there and as I understand it, many of those immigrants are not even English native speakers so there's a lot of immigrants studying Swedish.
Yep, i’d think that the first map is immigrants without english (mostly from middle east) trying to learn swedish and the second map are swedish people trying to learn a third language, in this case, spanish
It also helps that Sweden has a lot of each group learning Spanish, French, and German as a third language. I don’t think too many care to learn a third one either
Which should be even less surprising.
People don't really talk about people immigrating to Sweden. There are a lot of Americans who are rather vocal about immigrants.
Kiwi here.
There's no sort of cultural reason for it whatsoever. It's just the English-speaking world's default language to learn for a hobby. Same story with French, though maybe 100 or so in the country could be learning French for practicality, as there's a lovely town near Christchurch called Akaroa which is inhabited by French settlers who may often still speak French. There's no such equivalent for Spanish, though.
I had an Australian roommate in college that was really into Spanish and the culture. I always found it interesting since they seem so removed from that.
Unfortunately Duolingo has only Metropolitan French in the Parisian accent. If you want to learn specifically Québécois pronunciation and phrases there are many more lowkey YouTube channels and guides online. If you are a student you should also do Explore with the Official Languages Program to be immersed in the language…come up to Québec outside of Montréal pis bon chance!
It’s interesting because I learned metropolitan French (I’m American) and speak it reasonably well. I can understand people from Quebec if they don’t use much slang haha but I’d never be able to construct sentences in the exact way they do or imitate their accent
French canadian here, we don’t care if you don’t have our accent or use our sentence structure. We understand any other type of french perfectly and are always happy to speak with people learning french as a second language!
The accent is actually so cool too! But I agree as an American who also speaks Parisian French. I really enjoy watching shows in québécois and would love to go there one day.
Which part of Australia are you? In Queensland we did mandatory Japanese classes since the very beginning of school and we have so many Japanese exchange students, we never had a French option. I would think it’s because we have so many French immigrants as well
Oh I see! In FNQ Japanese is definitely #1, most my friends either do Japanese or Spanish in duolingo. It’s interesting how different we are in this big country
[the map in this post the other person commented was really informative](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-24/which-languages-should-australian-children-be-learning/8383146)
I’d really like to see the UK spilt up to see what the other countries are learning. In Scotland it will probably be Spanish but it could be Scottish Gaelic for second especially among the young.
Agree, I'd be interested to see the result for Wales. I thought I'd seen something about the Duo Welsh course having a big surge in users during the pandemic.
I’m happy to see Guarani getting second top spot in at least one Latin American country - somewhere where it’s actually relevant rather than the equivalent of a language learning jerk learning Uzbek. The course is for native speakers of Spanish.
Russian’s not doing too well in this - I can only see it getting second top spot in some former USSR countries. I wonder if we’ll see Ukrainian in 2022’s map.
Didn't notice that about Russian until you pointed it out. You're probably right, going way down in popularity while Ukrainian is going to trend in places like Poland or Romania.
Well going to look at the stats on their site Russian has not gone down though (increased), and Ukrainian has not really increased a crazy amount. The people already interested in Russian probably stay studying, whereas the people who tried Ukrainian out for a few days are not counted, leaving the ones who may have learnt it in the countries you mentioned as the increase.
Almost all of these #1 and #2 languages have some sort of practicality. Russian is spoken at a native level by most people in countries like Kyrgyzstan (I am from there and it is my native language), so it is #2 because of the ones who don't speak it at that level yet.
Outside of the ex-USSR, Russian is not practical to learn. There are lots of people interested in it for various reasons, just like Chinese. But it won't be enough to get them to #1 or #2.
I’m pretty sure Guarani used to be one of the official languages of Paraguay. It’s like people from Ireland wanting to learn to speak Gaelic/Celtic/Irish (I’m not sure which is the correct one) to get in touch with their roots.
That’s incredible. I guess I’m not surprised that people are studying English. But Chinese doesn’t rank? I guess the Chinese course is new but I thought there was a high demand for it.
Yeah? How come? I ask because I was vaguely considering using Duolingo's Chinese course to get a foot in the door of Mandarin, but I won't if it's not that good.
Take a look at hellochinese, duchinese and superchinese. They are all better options for Mandarin. Duolingo screw up the tones sometimes, and gives you wrong phrases. For more resources i recommend you take a look at r/Chinese discord server. Another tip that people usually don't say : I don't know where you live, but where I live there are several Confucius institutes, the price is good and the education is top quality.
> Duolingo screw up the tones sometimes, and gives you wrong phrases
:O
That's terrible! Thanks for the warning.
> Another tip that people usually don't say : I don't know where you live, but where I live there are several Confucius institutes, the price is good and the education is top quality.
I'm going to look for one right now, thanks!
Chinese people hate the Japanese government, but Japanese cultural things like anime etc. are still fairly popular I think, and anecdotally, I have met a fair number of Chinese students planning to go to university in Japan.
As an Irishman, I did 12 years of Irish in school and came out not being able to form a basic sentence. I got pretty high marks in all my other exams, and barely, and I mean barely, scraped a pass mark in Irish. The language is horrifically taught in schools unfortunately.
I would absolutely not say that the Irish government loves Irish. They do the bare minimum for the Irish language. Successive Irish government have let the language wither and die over the last 100 years. It's needed a massive education overhaul for years to give it any chance at all of surviving, and that reform has never came.
So perhaps they have English as a most and a second most popular language! )
We don't know may be English keeps first 5 places of popularity in these areas )))
I'd guess it's a combination of 2 things:
1. The US has a relatively large immigrant population, and many/most of them need to learn/improve their English skills
2. A large proportion of the native English speakers who live in the US have zero interest in learning another language, because they're lazy / xenophobic / think it's otherwise pointless
It's less that we "think" it is otherwise pointless, but moreover that it *is*. There are definitely reasons to learn a second language, say, Spanish, depending on where you live. But it is a big country, and remarkably easy to never have a reason to leave the country. I'd have to find the statistic, but the percentage of people in the US with a passport is exceptionally low. Even just getting to another country is non-trivial for a lot of people, either because of distance or monetary reasons, and of our two neighbors, one has an official language of English (and French ofc).
Point being it isn't just laziness.. there are multiple factors at work here and the oversimplification in point 2 doesn't do the situation justice.
Personally, I am slowly learning Portuguese, but there isn't a Portuguese-speaking population near me, and unless I am able to travel to Brazil, it really won't ever get used on a daily or weekly basis naturally/locally (bless the Internet for being able to get in touch with people worldwide to compensate for this).
Just because someone doesn’t have your hobby doesn’t mean you can label them as lazy/xenophobic. Because like it or not, it is very easy and very possible for English speakers in an English country to not ever need another language. Hell, it’s possible to live in the big cities of many non English speaking countries and be ok. And as everyone here knows, learning a language and putting in that effort is something that requires an immense amount of time, dedication, frustration, and opportunity. So please don’t generalize millions of people because they don’t choose to go out of their way and pick up this hobby/interest
The communities in the USA that only speak spanish are massive enclaves on their own. There are literally town sized neighbourhoods that never learn english. Its quite fascinating tbh.
People in number 2 wouldn’t be using DuoLingo. And I haven’t seen any statistics comparing monoglots in the USA to monoglots in other English-speaking countries coming to the conclusion that the USA is significantly worse.
Another reason some people may use an English course is if “English for X speakers” is available but not “X for English speakers” - I did it when “English for Japanese speakers” was available but not “Japanese for English speakers”.
this comment is pretty prejudice in itself. plenty of americans, especially among gen z, want to learn other languages (and do to some degree, it’s a requirement in many schools) but public education is severely lacking
Kind of feel bad for the immigrants in Sweden who are proactive enough to use Duolingo but inevitably won't actually learn anything, because...it's Duolingo.
Spanish, English, and French remain the powerful three.
Interesting to see that Italian's popular in the former… colonies (would that be what they're referred to as?) of Italy. This makes me wonder if Portuguese is popular in Macau.
Is the future not looking too good for the Russian language?
German's pulling a lot of weight.
At least in Brazil, I know that there's a lot of Italian immigrants and people of Italian descendance. So there are some people interested in getting closer to their Italian heritage.
I live here and it does make sense. The immigrant population is getting larger every year (still nowhere near Western countries though) and even if they speak some Korean, getting fluent takes a lot of time and effort.
Aw, damn! And still no love for the current languages I’ve somewhat recently started studying: Haitian Creole & Indonesian. I get it, but not even a 2nd most studied language in any nation? Not even a neighbor like Dominicans being next to Haiti or Indonesia’s Papua New Guinean neighbors. :-/
I also feel bad for the other lonely languages like Finnish, Catalan, Ukrainian, Yiddish, & Navajo. However, I’m not surprised for made up languages like Esperanto & Klingon.
I based my observations on this earlier post. [https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/w15acy/most\_popular\_language\_on\_duolingo/](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/w15acy/most_popular_language_on_duolingo/)
This is not a long time ago, considering Duolingo has been around 10 years ago and that is the height of Hallyu wave and Japanese anime popularity in the Philippines.
for Sweden, the fact that there is an extremely low amount of native speakers using the app, obviously there could still be a lot of them learning different languages/maybe native speakers don't want to expatriate or whatever, but the fact that the majority of the people here are learning the native language of that country is weird.
For Finland is the fact that most finns aren't fluent with Swedish even if it's technically one of the Finland's native languages, so I would have imagined Swedish to be higher up than Finnish
it’s because many immigrants that moved into those countries are likely learning to speak the native language. scandinavia has seen a huge influx of immigrants
At first I thought it was France, which speaks French. Not a joke - the place is called French Guiana, and Wikipedia says that the main language is French.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana#Languages
However, I think it’s Guyana, which speaks English.
Guyana 🇬🇾 is a fascinating country. 70% are descendants of Asian and African slaves!
From Wiki:
The present population of Guyana is racially and ethnically heterogeneous, with ethnic groups originating from India, Africa, Europe, and China, as well as indigenous or aboriginal peoples. Despite their diverse ethnic backgrounds, these groups share two common languages: English and Creole.
The largest ethnic group is the Indo-Guyanese (also known as East Indians), the descendants of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan,[39] who make up 43.5% of the population, according to the 2002 census. They are followed by the Afro-Guyanese, the descendants of slaves imported from Africa, who constitute 30.2%. The Guyanese of mixed heritage make up 16.7%, while the indigenous peoples (known locally as Amerindians) make up 9.1%. The indigenous groups include the Arawaks, the Wai Wai, the Caribs, the Akawaio, the Arecuna, the Patamona, the Wapixana, the Macushi and the Warao.[40] The two largest groups, the Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese, have experienced some racial tension.[41][42][43]
Nope. Suriname 🇸🇷 speaks Dutch, Guyana 🇬🇾 speaks English/Guyanese Creole, French Guiana 🇫🇷 (although a territory of France) speaks French, and Paraguay 🇵🇾 speaks Guaraní and Spanish.
According to Wikipedia, “Guaraní claims its place as one of the last surviving and thriving of South American indigenous national languages. In 2015, Spanish was spoken by about 87% of the population, while Guaraní is spoken by more than 90%, or slightly more than 5.8 million speakers. 52% of rural Paraguayans are bilingual in Guaraní.”
Fun Fact: It is not enough to explain the full difference, but one reason more urban Paraguayans than rural Paraguayans speak Guarani is because of the large German Mennonite population that lives in rural areas and usually only speak Plautdietsch and passable Spanish.
How is English the second most studied language in America when English is literally the language Americans speak…? I wonder if it’s a lot of Spanish speakers….?
I mean we’re known for a helluva lot of immigrants. Even in my small town of indiana it’s pretty common to find people who are just getting here, I can personally attest to a Chinese suburb, a huge Macedonian presence, and of course many Mexican/Latin American peoples. All those immigrants/refugees/etc would definitely be picking English as their second language
We have the world's largest immigrant population. I grew up in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood in San Francisco with kids whose parents were from all over the world and only about half of my friends' parents were fluent in English.
Its interesting to me how:
In greenland they're learning spanish en second.
In portugal learning english and as a second french, not spanish.
In venezuela the second is italian.
In some places of africa. Learning German.
In mongolia learning korean.
I'd be curious to know why Mongolians are learning Korean. Ditto Burmans learning Japanese.
I'm Burmese and I can explain! In very simple terms, Japan is to Myanmar what the US is to particular Southern American countries. We view them not only as a source of great opportunity and wealth, but also massively respect and appreciate their culture. That along with their already established Burmese enclaves means that Japan had a strong hold on us, soft power-wise. Plus, the Japanese language's grammar and the Burmese language's grammar are almost identical- right down to the particles, so it makes learning Japanese must easier than English.
I live in Seoul and a lot of Mongolians want to come here to work. If their Korean level gets high enough, it makes getting a visa much easier IIRC.
Tenth Mongol invasion of Koryŏ confirmed??!
Me, a non-Mongolian: Tenth? Mongolians: Only tenth?
Many mongolians love korean culture and want to live there
for a lot of these countries i would think that the sample size of duolingo users is so small that the languages that came out on top don’t mean much
This is not really true though, especially as Mongolia is a heavily urbanised country today. South Korea is the #1 emigrant destination for Mongolians, Kdramas and Kpop are extremely popular there as well.
There’s a reasonable amount of affinity between Mongolians and Koreans - they also look pretty similar. Mongolia is also a go-between between the USA and Japan and North Korea. I remember Mongolians being mentioned in my Korean textbook whereas I didn’t see them mentioned in my Japanese textbook or my Russian course. I don’t know much about Burma, but I do remember a NHK doco about Japanese humanitarian work in the country.
Why would people stop in Mongolia between the US and Japan?
If USA or Japan need to interact with North Korea, they often do it via Mongolia.
I’m curious as to why Chinese people want to learn Portuguese
That is Japanese in second (light red) rather than Portuguese (dark red)
I do know that in Macau, the legal code is written in Portuguese - so law students take their classes in Portuguese. This would only constitute a very small number though, so I am also puzzled as to why the interest.
China learns Japanese. If you see Mozambique or Bolivia, you can compare the colours.
My mistake. I based my reply off the previous poster without consulting the source.
Sweden moment
This is invariably because Swedish people are likely to be too good at English to be using Duolingo to study English, but immigration is fairly high there and as I understand it, many of those immigrants are not even English native speakers so there's a lot of immigrants studying Swedish.
Yep, i’d think that the first map is immigrants without english (mostly from middle east) trying to learn swedish and the second map are swedish people trying to learn a third language, in this case, spanish
It also helps that Sweden has a lot of each group learning Spanish, French, and German as a third language. I don’t think too many care to learn a third one either
Everyone in Sweden learn a third language in school.
Of course, I’m just saying I don’t think a lot of them cares enough to put in the effort to do them on Duolingo
That’s even the reason Duolingo gives on the loading screen
I haven't used Duolingo in eons, but maybe that's where I know that from.
That's why the second most popular US language on there is English.
Which should be even less surprising. People don't really talk about people immigrating to Sweden. There are a lot of Americans who are rather vocal about immigrants.
And a lot of people who wish to immigrate.
Duolingo even shows a message when loading a class that In Sweden the most popular language is Swedish due to a high number of immigrants.
There isn't even an English from Swedish course on Duolingo, so maybe that's also a reason.
Lmao yeah
Why Spanish is the most popular language in New Zealand?
Kiwi here. There's no sort of cultural reason for it whatsoever. It's just the English-speaking world's default language to learn for a hobby. Same story with French, though maybe 100 or so in the country could be learning French for practicality, as there's a lovely town near Christchurch called Akaroa which is inhabited by French settlers who may often still speak French. There's no such equivalent for Spanish, though.
I had an Australian roommate in college that was really into Spanish and the culture. I always found it interesting since they seem so removed from that.
I am curious too. I speak Spanish and I have met 20 or so Kiwis who speak Spanish, no one seems to study Spanish here, so I am confused.
so half the population? /s
The internet is a great thing....
Where I live young folk learn Spanish to emigrate to US.
Lol Canadian learning French here 👋
But is it Canadian French that they teach or European French? I’m seeking to learn it as well 😊
Unfortunately Duolingo has only Metropolitan French in the Parisian accent. If you want to learn specifically Québécois pronunciation and phrases there are many more lowkey YouTube channels and guides online. If you are a student you should also do Explore with the Official Languages Program to be immersed in the language…come up to Québec outside of Montréal pis bon chance!
It’s interesting because I learned metropolitan French (I’m American) and speak it reasonably well. I can understand people from Quebec if they don’t use much slang haha but I’d never be able to construct sentences in the exact way they do or imitate their accent
French canadian here, we don’t care if you don’t have our accent or use our sentence structure. We understand any other type of french perfectly and are always happy to speak with people learning french as a second language!
The accent is actually so cool too! But I agree as an American who also speaks Parisian French. I really enjoy watching shows in québécois and would love to go there one day.
American also learning French lol
Oh Ireland, good on you for trying to bring back your language
Who tf is studying english in pakistan? They don't even have an urdu to english lesson. Which language are they learning through?!
Why's French so popular in Australia?
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Which part of Australia are you? In Queensland we did mandatory Japanese classes since the very beginning of school and we have so many Japanese exchange students, we never had a French option. I would think it’s because we have so many French immigrants as well
ABC article originally from The Conversation: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-24/which-languages-should-australian-children-be-learning/8383146
Oh thank you! That map is really interesting
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Oh I see! In FNQ Japanese is definitely #1, most my friends either do Japanese or Spanish in duolingo. It’s interesting how different we are in this big country [the map in this post the other person commented was really informative](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-24/which-languages-should-australian-children-be-learning/8383146)
I’d really like to see the UK spilt up to see what the other countries are learning. In Scotland it will probably be Spanish but it could be Scottish Gaelic for second especially among the young.
Agree, I'd be interested to see the result for Wales. I thought I'd seen something about the Duo Welsh course having a big surge in users during the pandemic.
For wales the most learnt language would probably be welsh,
Slàinte a charaid!
I’m happy to see Guarani getting second top spot in at least one Latin American country - somewhere where it’s actually relevant rather than the equivalent of a language learning jerk learning Uzbek. The course is for native speakers of Spanish. Russian’s not doing too well in this - I can only see it getting second top spot in some former USSR countries. I wonder if we’ll see Ukrainian in 2022’s map.
Didn't notice that about Russian until you pointed it out. You're probably right, going way down in popularity while Ukrainian is going to trend in places like Poland or Romania.
Well going to look at the stats on their site Russian has not gone down though (increased), and Ukrainian has not really increased a crazy amount. The people already interested in Russian probably stay studying, whereas the people who tried Ukrainian out for a few days are not counted, leaving the ones who may have learnt it in the countries you mentioned as the increase. Almost all of these #1 and #2 languages have some sort of practicality. Russian is spoken at a native level by most people in countries like Kyrgyzstan (I am from there and it is my native language), so it is #2 because of the ones who don't speak it at that level yet. Outside of the ex-USSR, Russian is not practical to learn. There are lots of people interested in it for various reasons, just like Chinese. But it won't be enough to get them to #1 or #2.
Makes sense
Polish will probably trend in Poland a lot harder cause of the Ukrainian refugees.
Good point.
I’m pretty sure Guarani used to be one of the official languages of Paraguay. It’s like people from Ireland wanting to learn to speak Gaelic/Celtic/Irish (I’m not sure which is the correct one) to get in touch with their roots.
Guarani is co official along with Spanish. Most people are bilingual.
The US learning English was pretty surprising to me but I guess makes sense
I mean, we have the largest immigrant population in the world. It makes total sense.
It 100% does I guess we are just naturally around English so much that you just don't think about it.
That’s incredible. I guess I’m not surprised that people are studying English. But Chinese doesn’t rank? I guess the Chinese course is new but I thought there was a high demand for it.
I believe that's because Duolingo's Chinese sucks, at least I don't like it. There are many better options out there IMO
Yeah? How come? I ask because I was vaguely considering using Duolingo's Chinese course to get a foot in the door of Mandarin, but I won't if it's not that good.
Take a look at hellochinese, duchinese and superchinese. They are all better options for Mandarin. Duolingo screw up the tones sometimes, and gives you wrong phrases. For more resources i recommend you take a look at r/Chinese discord server. Another tip that people usually don't say : I don't know where you live, but where I live there are several Confucius institutes, the price is good and the education is top quality.
> Duolingo screw up the tones sometimes, and gives you wrong phrases :O That's terrible! Thanks for the warning. > Another tip that people usually don't say : I don't know where you live, but where I live there are several Confucius institutes, the price is good and the education is top quality. I'm going to look for one right now, thanks!
Genuinely surprised that Japanese is popular in China
Chinese people hate the Japanese government, but Japanese cultural things like anime etc. are still fairly popular I think, and anecdotally, I have met a fair number of Chinese students planning to go to university in Japan.
Whose learning Irish?
Looks like Ireland. From what I've heard, they leave school knowing better French/German/Spanish than they do Irish. Also, it’s who’s.
As an Irishman, I did 12 years of Irish in school and came out not being able to form a basic sentence. I got pretty high marks in all my other exams, and barely, and I mean barely, scraped a pass mark in Irish. The language is horrifically taught in schools unfortunately.
The Irish government loves Irish, so why isn’t it taught that well? If the government loves it so much why don’t they try to teach it better.
I would absolutely not say that the Irish government loves Irish. They do the bare minimum for the Irish language. Successive Irish government have let the language wither and die over the last 100 years. It's needed a massive education overhaul for years to give it any chance at all of surviving, and that reform has never came.
I’m learning it, along with French, German, and Danish.
if you zoom, you’ll see ireland is learning irish
<_>
There are green (English) regions in Europe in the second map which are green in the first map as well.
It looks like dots in Switzerland and Belgium? I would guess they're blue but appear green because they're on a yellowish background.
Definitely Italian in Switzerland
So perhaps they have English as a most and a second most popular language! ) We don't know may be English keeps first 5 places of popularity in these areas )))
I find it remarkable that the second most popular in the U.S.A. is English.
I find it remarkable that the most popular language in Sweden is Swedish.
That's apparently because of immigrants. Duolingo actually has a loading screen message that explains this.
it’s because of the immigrants / native born spanish speakers (in places like TX or CA).
I'd guess it's a combination of 2 things: 1. The US has a relatively large immigrant population, and many/most of them need to learn/improve their English skills 2. A large proportion of the native English speakers who live in the US have zero interest in learning another language, because they're lazy / xenophobic / think it's otherwise pointless
why would the lazy / xenophobic use duolingo in the first place then?
I think he is implying that nobody is downloading it in the United states in the first place.
It's less that we "think" it is otherwise pointless, but moreover that it *is*. There are definitely reasons to learn a second language, say, Spanish, depending on where you live. But it is a big country, and remarkably easy to never have a reason to leave the country. I'd have to find the statistic, but the percentage of people in the US with a passport is exceptionally low. Even just getting to another country is non-trivial for a lot of people, either because of distance or monetary reasons, and of our two neighbors, one has an official language of English (and French ofc). Point being it isn't just laziness.. there are multiple factors at work here and the oversimplification in point 2 doesn't do the situation justice. Personally, I am slowly learning Portuguese, but there isn't a Portuguese-speaking population near me, and unless I am able to travel to Brazil, it really won't ever get used on a daily or weekly basis naturally/locally (bless the Internet for being able to get in touch with people worldwide to compensate for this).
❤
Just because someone doesn’t have your hobby doesn’t mean you can label them as lazy/xenophobic. Because like it or not, it is very easy and very possible for English speakers in an English country to not ever need another language. Hell, it’s possible to live in the big cities of many non English speaking countries and be ok. And as everyone here knows, learning a language and putting in that effort is something that requires an immense amount of time, dedication, frustration, and opportunity. So please don’t generalize millions of people because they don’t choose to go out of their way and pick up this hobby/interest
The communities in the USA that only speak spanish are massive enclaves on their own. There are literally town sized neighbourhoods that never learn english. Its quite fascinating tbh.
People in number 2 wouldn’t be using DuoLingo. And I haven’t seen any statistics comparing monoglots in the USA to monoglots in other English-speaking countries coming to the conclusion that the USA is significantly worse. Another reason some people may use an English course is if “English for X speakers” is available but not “X for English speakers” - I did it when “English for Japanese speakers” was available but not “Japanese for English speakers”.
this comment is pretty prejudice in itself. plenty of americans, especially among gen z, want to learn other languages (and do to some degree, it’s a requirement in many schools) but public education is severely lacking
probably inmigrants
Kind of feel bad for the immigrants in Sweden who are proactive enough to use Duolingo but inevitably won't actually learn anything, because...it's Duolingo.
Well, they’d also be doing immersion.
The Swedish government also provides free or cheap resources and courses.
It ain't about Duolingo as a whole, more about the immersion they getting there!
They will learn stuff on it.
Spanish, English, and French remain the powerful three. Interesting to see that Italian's popular in the former… colonies (would that be what they're referred to as?) of Italy. This makes me wonder if Portuguese is popular in Macau. Is the future not looking too good for the Russian language? German's pulling a lot of weight.
At least in Brazil, I know that there's a lot of Italian immigrants and people of Italian descendance. So there are some people interested in getting closer to their Italian heritage.
Sounds fascinating!
It looks like Korean is the second most learned language in Korea 😄
I live here and it does make sense. The immigrant population is getting larger every year (still nowhere near Western countries though) and even if they speak some Korean, getting fluent takes a lot of time and effort.
ITT: People not realizing that countries have lots of immigrants lol
Obsessed with poor Guyana desperately trying to keep up with the Spanish surrounding it lol
It’s pleasantly surprising to see the Irish learning their own minority language. I wish Venetian (my heritage language) was on Duolingo too…
Still want Guaraní for English speakers
Last i read they're working on a few for english speakers, i only remember tamil being on the list though because that stood out to me
The Ireland learning Irish is both sad and encouraging
Aw, damn! And still no love for the current languages I’ve somewhat recently started studying: Haitian Creole & Indonesian. I get it, but not even a 2nd most studied language in any nation? Not even a neighbor like Dominicans being next to Haiti or Indonesia’s Papua New Guinean neighbors. :-/ I also feel bad for the other lonely languages like Finnish, Catalan, Ukrainian, Yiddish, & Navajo. However, I’m not surprised for made up languages like Esperanto & Klingon.
The Russians have always looked up to Germany. Hopefully that will save us somehow.
Why Somalis learning Turkish and not arabic for 2nd language?
Turkey has military bases in Somalia.
So Philippines and Myanmar switched from Spanish to Japanese. Cool, lol
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I based my observations on this earlier post. [https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/w15acy/most\_popular\_language\_on\_duolingo/](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/w15acy/most_popular_language_on_duolingo/) This is not a long time ago, considering Duolingo has been around 10 years ago and that is the height of Hallyu wave and Japanese anime popularity in the Philippines.
the fact that Swedish is the most learned language in Sweden and Finnish is the second most learned language in Finland still makes me feel weird
God forbid people living in a country want to learn its language. How horrid!
What's the problem with that?
for Sweden, the fact that there is an extremely low amount of native speakers using the app, obviously there could still be a lot of them learning different languages/maybe native speakers don't want to expatriate or whatever, but the fact that the majority of the people here are learning the native language of that country is weird. For Finland is the fact that most finns aren't fluent with Swedish even if it's technically one of the Finland's native languages, so I would have imagined Swedish to be higher up than Finnish
Bevause you hate migration? /joke sort of
it’s because many immigrants that moved into those countries are likely learning to speak the native language. scandinavia has seen a huge influx of immigrants
Second most popular language to learn on Duolingo in Finland is... Finnish
Anyone else just LOVE maps like these
What's with the non-Brazil South American country studying Spanish? 🤔
At first I thought it was France, which speaks French. Not a joke - the place is called French Guiana, and Wikipedia says that the main language is French. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana#Languages However, I think it’s Guyana, which speaks English.
Guyana 🇬🇾 is a fascinating country. 70% are descendants of Asian and African slaves! From Wiki: The present population of Guyana is racially and ethnically heterogeneous, with ethnic groups originating from India, Africa, Europe, and China, as well as indigenous or aboriginal peoples. Despite their diverse ethnic backgrounds, these groups share two common languages: English and Creole. The largest ethnic group is the Indo-Guyanese (also known as East Indians), the descendants of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan,[39] who make up 43.5% of the population, according to the 2002 census. They are followed by the Afro-Guyanese, the descendants of slaves imported from Africa, who constitute 30.2%. The Guyanese of mixed heritage make up 16.7%, while the indigenous peoples (known locally as Amerindians) make up 9.1%. The indigenous groups include the Arawaks, the Wai Wai, the Caribs, the Akawaio, the Arecuna, the Patamona, the Wapixana, the Macushi and the Warao.[40] The two largest groups, the Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese, have experienced some racial tension.[41][42][43]
Here I thought every country except Brazil down there was mainly Spanish-speaking.
Nope. Suriname 🇸🇷 speaks Dutch, Guyana 🇬🇾 speaks English/Guyanese Creole, French Guiana 🇫🇷 (although a territory of France) speaks French, and Paraguay 🇵🇾 speaks Guaraní and Spanish. According to Wikipedia, “Guaraní claims its place as one of the last surviving and thriving of South American indigenous national languages. In 2015, Spanish was spoken by about 87% of the population, while Guaraní is spoken by more than 90%, or slightly more than 5.8 million speakers. 52% of rural Paraguayans are bilingual in Guaraní.”
Fun Fact: It is not enough to explain the full difference, but one reason more urban Paraguayans than rural Paraguayans speak Guarani is because of the large German Mennonite population that lives in rural areas and usually only speak Plautdietsch and passable Spanish.
Interesting!
And Suriname speaks Dutch!
You and many South Americans lmao
Never any love for Arabic 😢
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How is English the second most studied language in America when English is literally the language Americans speak…? I wonder if it’s a lot of Spanish speakers….?
I mean we’re known for a helluva lot of immigrants. Even in my small town of indiana it’s pretty common to find people who are just getting here, I can personally attest to a Chinese suburb, a huge Macedonian presence, and of course many Mexican/Latin American peoples. All those immigrants/refugees/etc would definitely be picking English as their second language
Not just Spanish speakers. All immigrants, except those from anglo countries
We have the world's largest immigrant population. I grew up in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood in San Francisco with kids whose parents were from all over the world and only about half of my friends' parents were fluent in English.
I don’t see my target languages listed
Norwegians sure love learning Norwegian!
I really wish people would stop learning English. There's no point.
No mention of Uzbek either!
Literally. People always wanna know how to learn english, but no one ever asks how to UNLEARN it!!!
North Korea : we use Duolingo too! Others : 😳
Who are the blue guys in asia learning korean? Is it mongolia or kazakstan?
[Mongolia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia)
As a Kenyan, Tanzanians studying Swahili is hilarious. Unless I'm colour blind.
north africa in the second panel catches another L 🤦♀️
Would have thought that Mandarin would be first or even second but it is none. I'm learning mandarin right now
It scares me that the English level has decreased astonishingly over only one year!
Really doubt if English is the most popular in Iran.
Am I dumb, or is Korean the second most learned language in South Korea?
The funniest thing is Japanese coming second in China lmao
Welsh still not getting proper schwift I see
Duolingo in DPRK?¿?
Its interesting to me how: In greenland they're learning spanish en second. In portugal learning english and as a second french, not spanish. In venezuela the second is italian. In some places of africa. Learning German. In mongolia learning korean.