My Korean after 15 years

It's been 15 years since I first learned Korean, and 13-14 since I've known it to fluency, and since then I haven't spent a day without spending at least a few hours using it. When learning a language you not only learn a language but also create your own way of speaking it, in the same way you do with any other language including your first one, and I thought it would be interesting to jot down a few points on what characteristics my Korean has. They are in no particular order, and I think I'll update the post from time to time as others come to mind.

• 가르치다 vs. 가리키다 - always make sure to properly use 가르치다. Same for 다르다 vs. 틀리다. It bugs me a little when I hear it used wrongly, but it's so prevalent that I won't ever mention it.
• 너무 vs. 아주. 너무 when technically used wrongly in positive sentences (너무 더워) doesn't bug me. I think trying to correct people on this is a battle that has long since been lost.
• ㅇ is cute. Words that have a lot of ㅇ in them have always and still do sound cute. 엉덩이, 비행기, 꽹과리, ~쟁이, even 약쟁이 and 술주정뱅이.
• That might be why I don't mind seeing and writing 뱅기 for 비행기 even though I'm a purist otherwise when it comes to spelling.
• On that note, I strongly dislike seeing words like 저나 (전화) and 시러 (싫어) and all the rest of these lazy spellings.
• Of course spellings like 쬐끔 for 조금 and so on are completely fine as they change the meaning. You can almost see the person making the two-finger gesture when saying 쬐끔.
• 가지고 - for some reason I still dislike using 가지고 where you connect it to a verb/adjective like 더워가지고 or 돈이 없어가지고. Feels whiny or unfocused, I always hear people using it when grousing on the phone with a friend or girlfriend in a low voice at a PC bang or somewhere and it doesn't make me want to do the same.
• I like when phrases like 단언컨대 that are usually more literary than colloquial suddenly get popular and get used a lot for a while.
• I'm not sure if I care that 부셔버리다 is incorrect while 부숴버리다 is not. Maybe I should.
• Korean is a lot of fun when you get to the end of a sentence and your brain kind of wants to say two things at once and you end up with a mix of the two. I do this a lot when my mind is elsewhere. For example I saw my cat on the stairs the other day when I thought she was sleeping and wanted to say to her 오, 여기 있었어? But I also wanted to say 오, 여기 있었구나! So what came out sounded something like 여깄었크써? as my brain decided it would be a good idea to just mash them together in lieu of choosing one.
• I never do any code switching (e.g. unnecessarily adding a bunch of English words into my Korean) unless I'm with a Korean who also speaks Japanese. Then it's code switching galore. It's so easy to switch between one and the other and sometimes the exact thing I want to say is in one language, not the other. Things like そう言われたくない! or 文句ある? or 平気 and so on just tend to slip out.
• I still don't have a Korean name for myself. Just 데이빛 with that exact spelling. I've played around with the idea of 데이(day)빛(light) becoming 일광(日光) but that's an awkward-sounding name.
• If I had to choose a surname for myself it might be 남궁. I have a tiny stuffed bear I got in 2004 that I've named 남궁덕전. He still travels with me in my pocket sometimes.
• Apparently 이 is now preferred to 이빨 but I still stick with 이빨 most of the time because it's not a homonym for anything else.
• I don't much care for the double 지 in phrases like 공부를 해야지 합격하지. I stick to 공부를 해야 합격하지.
• Sometimes a phrase gets put on hold for usage in my head because I've only heard it used by a girl. Once I hear it used by a man as well then it's good to go. Phrases like 안봐도 비디오야, which feels a bit girlish but maybe that's just me. Outright 애교 of course is obviously girlish, but the possibly girlish phrases are the ones that get a question mark.
• I use a certain amount of 막, but not too much.
• Korean is the only language I talk to animals in. English just feels awkward now.

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Super Choose Day is coming soon

Every time Super Tuesday comes around I remember the first time I read about it, in a number of Japanese newspapers in early 2000 when I was living in Ichinomiya (right in between Nagoya and Gifu). Back then the internet was not so at one's fingertips as it is now, and I was reading about Bush vs. McCain in the primaries with a paper newspaper in one hand, paper dictionary in the other, and a notebook. I was 20 years old and not being American I hadn't paid much attention to US electoral politics until then, but I read everything I could find in the newspaper or two I bought daily, and the election was now getting quite a bit of coverage so I started to read about it. They were mentioning a day coming up called スーパーチューズデー, which I naturally assumed was Super Choose Day, since it was about an election. The newspapers did mention that it took place on 火曜日 (Tuesday), but I didn't put two and two together since Choose Day fit the katakana name so well.

I remember thinking that the name was a bit weird, and that either 1) the US chose a really juvenile-sounding way to name a day of such importance, or 2) the Japanese had for some reason enough interest in such a day that they gave it their own term, since Super Choose Day sounds a lot more like something they would come up with.

After a few weeks of this the day went by, and I stopped giving the term any thought. So it wasn't until 2004 with Kerry and the other Democratic primaries in the news that I realized that oh! it's Super Tuesday. Not Choose Day.

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Why Japan uses kanji

I came across this video today that explains it better than any other single video I've seen on the subject:



I have two points to add: one is that Korea has recently (past decade and a bit) started learning hanja again, not to write Korean in daily life but on a more macro- and historical scale, and also because it's good prep for Chinese and Japanese. Now it's only the generation in their 30s and 40s that doesn't know more than a few dozen hanja, for the most part.

The other point: one other reason not to get rid of kanji is because of China. It seems like an obvious point but China since the early 20th century until about a decade and a bit ago has more or less been a non-entity, which is an aberration when you consider its traditional role and strength. Now that China is back where it has traditionally been, it has become an easy country to point to when referencing the benefits of kanji / hanja.

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Epsilon rocket works on first try, Hisaki (SPRINT-A) telescope successfully deployed

Another reason to feel good in Japan just a few days after Tokyo won the 2020 Olympics - Japan's Epsilon rocket has worked on the first try, successfully launching the SPRINT-A (soon thereafter renamed Hisaki) telescope. Japan has been notorious for being plagued with launch failures, and this new rocket is very interesting, using a good deal of artificial intelligence which allows the number of crew at mission control to be reduced from 150 to just eight.



So what does the telescope do? It has a diameter of just 20 cm, and observes the atmospheres of planets in the Solar System in the ultraviolet spectrum, observations that cannot be conducted from the ground. Checking the Japanese Wikipedia on this telescope we see the reason why:

すでにアメリカのハッブル宇宙望遠鏡など、より高性能な宇宙望遠鏡が運用されているが、これらはさまざまな天体の観測に用いられるため惑星観測に充てられる時間は限られてしまう。特定の惑星専用の探査機を飛ばせば非常に高精度なデータが得られるものの、高額の費用がかかり、目的の惑星以外の観測は困難である。用途を太陽系内の惑星観測に限定すれば、ハッブル宇宙望遠鏡のような高い性能は必要ではなく、小型の安価な宇宙望遠鏡で、複数の惑星を継続的に観測できるという利点がある。

Hubble can do a better job of this already, but it is always tied up with more important observations, and thus long-term study of planets in the Solar System simply isn't possible. Launching a dedicated probe to a planet would also be nice, but costs are high and only one planet could be observed. With the launch of a telescope devoted to these objects, however, one can observe multiple planets in the long term at a relatively low cost.

The planets to be observed:

Jupiter and its aurora, the atmosphere of Io
The atmosphere (or rather, near-surface exosphere, magnetosphere) of Mercury
The interaction of the atmosphere of Venus and Mars with space
The aurora of Venus and Saturn, etc.

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German, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, English on the rise in Galicia

From here in Spanish:

Students studying in one of the EOIs (Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas) in Galicia have increased by 38.8% in the last four years, reaching 32,256 in the academic year 2012-2013...Data from the Xunta also reveal how language preferences have changed.

German is the language that has gained the most adherents with a 96.2% increase since 2008, reaching 1415 students. Following German is Portuguese with an increase of 71.1%, and Chinese with a 70.7% increase. The number of students studying Japanese has also increased by 62%, English by 40%,

Russian by 35%, French by 24%, and Italian by 18%.

I've separated Russian and the rest from the others as they have gained by less than the 38.8% gain in the total number of students, thus losing ground proportionally to the others.

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On learning Chinese (and Spanish and English) in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, for the 2014 World Cup

This article in Portuguese goes over some of the linguistic preparations taking place in Manaus, Amozonas, Brazil, where one of the stadiums being constructed for the 2014 World Cup is located. The article cites the 'complexity' of the language as one reason why municipal workers will only be learning the basics of Mandarin, but it's more unfamiliarity than complexity. A short-term intensive Chinese course given to Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese people for example could focus entirely on how to pronounce terminology shared with Chinese (and a few basics of grammar and word order) and end up with a vocabulary of a thousand or more words by the end of a few weeks. For example:

--- Do you use denwa (電話) in Chinese? Yes, it's diànhuà. Mainlanders simplify it as 电话.
--- Can you use 行 (iku) to mean go in Chinese? No, in Chinese this character means okay (xíng) - to go you use the character for saru (to leave, 去る) and pronounce it qù (instead of kyo).
--- Can you use the word hikooki (飛行機 ) in Chinese to mean airplane? Almost - take out the middle character  (and simplify the hanzi for mainlanders) and you have 飞机 (fēijī).
--- Can you use the word tenki (天気) in Chinese? Just about - simplify it (天气) and pronounce it as tiānqì and you're good.

Anyway, to the article:

The increase of Chinese companies with a presence in Manaus, along with the growing number of tourists leaving China to meet the Amazon, has led to growth in the provision of Mandarin language courses. Still available only in a small number of institutions, the learning of the language is also motivated by the World Cup in 2014 in the city.

Mindful of this, muncipal agent Elom de Oliveira began studying Mandarin last week...in the second semester of study Elom will resume a Spanish course that was interrupted...To begin studying the Chinese language, he and 46 others enrolled in the first basic Mandarin course sponsored by the Fundação Escola de Serviço Público Municipal (FESPM).

The free course is part of the "Training Program for the 2014 World Cup" (Programa de Capacitação para a Copa 2014)...besides Mandarin, the program also offers classes in English and Spanish in four levels.

The director of FESPM (Angelo Bulbol) explained that the classes had a duration of 78 hours. "We cannot ignore China's growth. It is imperative that professionals consolidate their careers by mastering Mandarin, which since 2009 is among the most requested by municipal employees."

She admitted that due to the complexity of the language, over the three months the classes will be focused on a general knowledge of culture, such as greetings and manners, weather conditions, tourist spots in the country, ethics, money and principal verbs.

She said that it is possible that the Foundation will offer intermediate and advanced Mandarin courses, but it will depend on the performance of current students in the class.

Data from Amazonastur shows that Chinese tourists to Amazonas grew by 6.1% in 2011 compared to the year before (10.6 million in 2010, 11.3 million in 2011).

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Most popular second foreign languages in Thailand: Chinese, Japanese, Korean

From here in Korean. English is not mentioned here but that is naturally the assumed first choice.

A study has shown that students in Thailand most prefer to learn Chinese, Japanese and Korean as their second foreign languages.

 The Thailand committee on basic education took a look at 700 schools, and found that 300,000 students were learning Chinese as their second foreign language. Students learning Japanese numbered 40,000, and Korean was about 12,000. Top-of-the-line schools historically preferred to choose French as the second foreign language for students to learn, but recently Asian languages have displaced it.

As I mention here from time to time, Chinese's first challenge as an international language is to appeal to China's closest neighbors. I wouldn't say that Korea is wowed by the country just yet, but it is developing a healthy respect for the language as an academic necessity. I've seen a few articles on that recently, and may reference one in the near future.

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No surprise: Koreans most want to learn English, Chinese, Japanese

Some info from an article here in Korean on foreign languages Koreans want to learn. Having Chinese in second place is no longer a surprise, but almost doubling Japanese in percentage of interested respondents may be. Spanish comes in surprisingly low.

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A survey done on 2050 families of university students and 958 working people in Korea on the languages they most wanted to study revealed the following:

"Are you currently studying a foreign language?" -- 46.6% responded yes, 32.8% responded "I plan to", 20.6% said no.

To the question "which foreign language do you want to study?" the responses were English (49.6%), Chinese (21.7%), Japanese (12.4%), French (3.5%), German (2.8%), Spanish (1.8%).

To the question "why do you most want to study a language?" the responses were personal development (44.6%), career and advantages (23.4%), workplace demands it (13.7%), for a promotion (6.9%), to read research papers and documents in original languages (2.6%), traveling abroad (1.9%).

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Which is easier for Koreans and Japanese to learn, English or Spanish?

That's the question I pose in this video I just made now. I made it in Korean and it will have Japanese subtitles, but I won't be able to add them until tomorrow. The video is basically asking Koreans and Japanese people that have studied Spanish to let me know how it was and whether they consider the language to be easier to learn than English (probably because of the easy spelling, stress and only five vowels) or whether they still find English to be easier due to some other reason - familiarity, grammar, verbs, lack of grammatical gender, that sort of thing. In the video I ask those who have studied it and have an opinion to write it in the comments below or to give the url of a blog of theirs detailing the experience, or even a video of their own. I'll write another post on the subject later on if the video gets noticed and we see any interesting responses.

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Korean city of Seogwipo to add Chinese and Japanese to street signs

Another piece of news today about the adding of Chinese and Japanese to the existing Korean and English (the last one was about announcements on the Incheon Metro):

The city of Seogwipo will be changing its local tourist information signs from the existing Korean/Korean hanja (Korean-style Chinese characters)/English to a quadrilingual Korean/English/Chinese/Japanese format.

The city said on the 4th of March that they would be investing about $220,000 (250 million won) this year in order to make the change, which is due to the recent and continuing increase of Chinese and Japanese tourists.

The city is located on the southern side of Jeju-do, the island in the far south of Korea where Chinese tourists don't need a visa to visit (that's part of the attraction). As the southernmost part of the southernmost part of the country it naturally has the mildest climate, and there is even a fair amount of diving. One diving shop there called Big Blue is owned by a German guy who has run it for quite some time. I've walked by there in person once but I don't think it was open that day.


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Chinese, Japanese to be added to subway announcements in Incheon, Korea (next to Seoul)

A short article from Yeonhap News here:

Incheon Metro said on March the 2nd that it would be adding Chinese and Japanese announcements to the subway starting this month in order to make it easier for non-Koreans to use the subway.

Last month Incheon Metro had added Chinese and Japanese announcements (in addition to the existing English ones) in the Songdo International City area of the subway and seven major stations.

A spokesperson from the Incheon Metro said that the added languages were part of the city's preparations for its hosting of the 2014 Asian Games.

Songdo, by the way, is this - a planned international business district that still has not managed to live up to its name. Last month I remember seeing a feature on the news about how empty the buildings there are, complete with interviews with taxi drivers that have yet to see a single foreigner in the area. It's not done yet though so let's give it a few more years to see if they can pull it off.

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Linguistic complications in Korea: 1950

Old editions of Cosmoglotta are being uploaded at a good pace, and I should be done the final years (1949 and 1950) in just a few days. Today I was looking at the final year and came across a short blurb about interpretation between American and Korean soldiers during the Korean War. Back then it was no difficult matter to find a Korean fluent in Japanese, and because American soldiers involved in the region had devoted most of their efforts to learning Japanese, two interpreters were often required.

Linguistic complication in Korea

According to Robert Bennyhoff in "Le Monde" (Paris, 1950.09.14), one of the many difficulties in the relations between American and South Korean officers is the diversity of languages. Few Koreans speak English correctly and no Americans speak the Korean language. Most frequently one has to resort to using two interpreters, the first translating English to Japanese and the second retranslating Japanese to Korean, or vice versa. It is easy to imagine, says Bennyhoff, the errors in interpretation and the endless confusion that results from that, and, he adds, sometimes miscomprehension brings a dear price.

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How JAXA does PR

Yesterday Japan successfully launched its second transfer vehicle, known as the Kounotori 2. Similar to the Automated Transfer Vehicle the ESA sends to the ISS from time to time, the role these vehicles play is quite simple: launch with a bunch of cargo, dock with the ISS, the astronauts on board then take the cargo in and eventually fill the now-empty vehicle up with waste, and a few months later they seal it off and deorbit it, and all the garbage burns up in the atmosphere and thus the mission ends.

Pretty boring, right? Not when JAXA is in charge. Take a look at their most recent video uploaded today promoting Kounotori 2, and prepare to get excited about a cargo in - garbage out unmanned mission. Select 720px to make it even better. I would have reuploaded the video with subtitles but I don't believe JAXA allows that so I've written the translation below.




0:02 - This...
0:05 - is the story of a spaceship...
0:10 - ...given the name The White Stork.
0:14 - KOUNOTORI (Japanese for stork) 2 H-II Transfer Vehicle MISSION
0:19 - (bottom corner) Space station supply vehicle Kounotori 2
0:23 - The mission it has been entrusted with: to deliver.
0:39 - Soar into infinite space, find your way to him (lit. to that person).
0:45 - Kounotori (HTV) control room
0:47 - International Space Station


This is par for the course for JAXA, and their YouTube account has a number of English videos as well for their more prominent missions.

So what does one of their videos look like for a mission that is exciting in and of itself? This video of the Earthrise video as taken by the Kaguya mission should answer that. Lyrics to the song are below. The song, Furusato (Home), is quite famous so no need to make a new English translation, though I have added transliteration to the right of the original lyrics. The song was originally written about one's home town, but when looking back on the Earth from lunar orbit one realizes that in fact the entire planet is our home (cue Carl Sagan quote).




うさぎ追いし　かの山 Usagi oishi kano yama
小ぶなつりし　かの川 Kobuna tsurishi kano kawa
夢はいまも　めぐりて Yume wa ima mo megurite
忘れがたき　ふるさと Wasuregataki furusato

I hunted rabbits on that mountain.
I fished for minnows in that stream.
I still dream about those days I spent when a child.
How I miss and long for my old country home.

いかにいます　父　母 Ikani imasu chichi haha
つつがなしや　友がき Tsutsuganashi ya tomogaki
雨に風に　つけても Ame ni kaze ni tsuketemo
思いいずる　ふるさと Omoiizuru furusato

Mother and father―are they doing well?
Is everything all right with my old friends?

When the rain falls, when the wind blows, I recall

My happy childhood and my old country home.

こころざしを　はたして Kokorozashi wo hatashite
いつの日にか　帰らん Itsuno hi ni ka kaeran
山はあおき　ふるさと Yama wa aoki furusato
水は清き　ふるさと Mizu wa kiyoki furusato

Some day when I have done what I set out to do,
I will return to where I used to have my home.
Lush and green are the mountains of my homeland.
Pure and clear is the water of my old country home.

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Ogaki city in Gifu, Japan begins broadcasting local news in Portuguese

Here's a piece of news in Japanese from today about a Portuguese-language news program that has begun in Japan. This is particularly interesting to me as this is the exact area where I first lived in Japan. The news program is for Brazilians living in Ogaki, which is just west of Ichinomiya where I lived, and the area in general is kind of a suburb of the much larger Nagoya, with the city of Gifu at about the same distance to the north if you feel like going to a bigger city on the weekend but are bored of always going to Nagoya. When I first lived there I was also struck by the large number of Brazilians, though at the time I was fully engaged in learning Japanese and Japanese only so I had no interest in Portuguese whatsoever then. Actually, the first non-Japanese person I ever spoke to in Japanese was a Mormon from Brazil.


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On the 14th of December (2010) Ogaki City's Ogaki Cable Television began broadcasting a local news program all in Portuguese for Brazilians living in the area. According to the prefecture Information Industry Division, "such a program entirely in Portuguese on cable television has never happened in Japan before".

A bit about how the program provides information for life in Japan, emergency services etc., skipping that...

The program is translated and created by a commission from the prefecture and is 30 minutes in length, broadcasting in Ogaki-shi, Kaizu-shi, Ikeda-shi, Kobe-cho, Tarui-cho, and Sekigahara-cho. Broadcasting time is Tuesday to Friday at 11 am, Saturday and Sunday from 1:30 pm and 11 pm.

The show can also be heard at any time online, and will also be shown in other places such as the TV monitor in the Brazilian-oriented school "HIRO Gakuen".

As of November there are 3142 Brazilians living in the city.

The internet address is: http://www.gifu-news.com/

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JAXA's excellent video on Venus and Akatsuki

JAXA has once again done an excellent PR job in this video for its newest probe, Akatsuki:



The same video can be seen in Japanese as well, with the exact same length and makeup.



What I'm most looking forward to after Akatsuki's arrival will be determining just why superrotation occurs in the area some 50 km above the surface of the planet, since this is the most Earth-like area in the entire solar system; nowhere else can one find both temperature and atmospheric pressure similar to our own at sea level. This area is both one where humans could potentially live (in aerostats that float due to the air we breathe being less dense than the Venusian atmosphere), but also an area that could potentially harbor life as well.

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Hayabusa has now returned to Earth as a glowing fireball

Check it out, Hayabusa's back:



A very impressive return for a spacecraft that almost never made it back and was plagued with a whole host of other problems. Though the sample gathering from the asteroid didn't function as planned if we luck out again there will be something in the sample container to analyze.

Some of the comments in Japanese below the video:

For some reason I'm crying, in spite of how short the video is. I think science and art are the most important fields for humans to be human.

Welcome back! You burned up, but that impressive work will live on in space development. Very good work, people from JAXA.

How beautiful. Banzai to Japanese scientists.

The re-entry has been watched very closely, as it's very valuable in understanding how asteroids interact with our atmosphere upon impact. Usually when an object enters the atmosphere we have only a vague notion of what it's made of, but with Hayabusa we know its exact composition, density, angle of impact, velocity etc., and thus this re-entry really is ideal for that.

One interesting idea: why not a mission to launch a number of cheap probes (perhaps three or so) to fly by asteroids somewhat close to Earth, followed by a return to Earth in the same way as Hayabusa. Each probe could be constructed of slightly different material, and each would also return to Earth in a different way due to having different targets. If three or so ideal candidates can be found (and WISE is certainly helping with that, having discovered 12,141 new asteroids so far), then it should be a fairly simple matter.

Edit: wow, this other video of the breakup is just phenomenal. The best part starts at 18 seconds in.

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On Japan's plans to create a robot-operated moon base by 2020

Today's news here in English and here in Japanese relates to what I've been saying about how the US should eventually have no choice but to begin concentrating on the Moon again (though the manned asteroid visit should be no problem), simply because the Moon is at just the right location whereby other nations (Japan, China, Russia, India) and private industry are able to explore it and I doubt that the US will be content to simply sit by and wait an extra 15 years for a single manned Mars flyby while the rest of the world is constructing and operating bases on the Moon. Wait for it...

As for the plan itself, it would involve sending robots to the south pole where solar energy is plentiful (24 days of light followed by 4 days of darkness) whereby they would then begin constructing a base. Recent experiences with the Mars rovers may lead one to believe that robots are incapable of doing work with any haste, but that is simply due to the large communication delay between here and Mars. On the Moon there is almost no delay at all (about 2.5 seconds there and back) so robots can easily be controlled from Earth, and in fact the Lunokhod rover drove a total of 37 km on the Moon back in 1973.


According to the proposal, the first robots would begin in 2015 by landing on the Moon, investigating and sending high-res images of the surface, as well as using seismometers to determine the interior composition of the Moon. After that in 2020 it would involve setting up a self-sufficient base through these robots which could move about in a 100 km radius, as well as sending back lunar rocks to Earth for analysis.

None of this is actually that difficult to accomplish, since the entire operation would be done robotically and these robots are extremely easy to control from Earth. Not only that, but setting up in the first place is not too difficult either. The rovers sent to Mars for example landed by using an interesting air bag system (inflate to encompass the rover, bounce bounce bounce bounce...then come to a stop, deflate and let the rover out) that would be impossible to use for humans due to the g-forces involved. Also note that since the Moon has (pretty much) no atmosphere any construction done on the Moon by these robots would be permanent. If part of setting up the base involved construction of a flat area for future landings, it would then remain as a permanent structure that anyone could use later on. Construct a habitation suitable for protecting humans from radiation and that would be there forever too.

Expected cost for the base: $2 billion, or less than one-eighth NASA's yearly budget. Or Canada's pitiful CSA budget (double it and I'll stop calling it pitiful) over 6 years.

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Twitter now only 50% English, followed by Japanese, Portuguese and Malaysian/Indonesian

Good, we have some new Twitter numbers. You may remember a post here from January and another here from September showing Portuguese to be the second-most used language on Twitter. According to those studies English was in first place with 65% and then 61%. Now we have some new numbers saying that English makes up just about 50% of the messages there, followed by Japanese with 14%, Portuguese with 9%, Malaysian (including Indonesian) with 6%, Spanish with 4%, and then Italian, Dutch and German each have about 1% or 2%.

The reason for the low Spanish numbers compared to Portuguese is probably because Portuguese is mostly concentrated in a single country (Brazil) where popular activities can quickly become a part of the mainstream, whereas Spanish, while spoken by more than Portuguese, is divided up among a large number of countries. Japanese suddenly shooting up like this (last time it only made up 6%) probably has something to do with this as well, since once it becomes popular it can pervade the entire country and thus pretty much the entire population than speaks the language.

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German influence on the Hebrew language

Here's a link readers might be interested in, on the effect German has had on Hebrew in the form of loanwords, most of which (according to the article) Hebrew speakers themselves aren't aware of the origin of. This seems to be the case in a lot of languages, and in Japanese and Korean as well are a number of loanwords from German like Arbeit (アルバイト, 아르바이트) and Röntgen (レントゲン, 뢴트겐선) that people either don't know the origin of, or assume to be English.

The same happens with French sometimes too, with words like enquette (アンケート, 앙케트) that many assume to be English too.

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Future online potential for top ten languages on the internet

Internetworldstats has a chart here that is often referenced when gauging the online presence of languages throughout the world. The chart features the top ten languages on the internet as well as their penetration, meaning the percentage of those using those languages that have access to the internet. Some languages have a high penetration and thus not much left expansion left (German, Japanese) while other languages have a very low penetration and thus much growth left to carry out. I turned the table into a graph that you can see below. The part in red shows the amount of people using the language that have access to the internet, and the grey part above represents the remaining potential for the language - people that speak the language but do not yet have internet access.

 

One language with a huge amount of potential is French, because of the large French-speaking population in Sub-Saharan Africa. Arabic is another one. Spanish has a large potential but is beginning to make use of it, as Spanish countries on the whole are more developed than French- and Arabic-speaking countries in Africa.

If you rearrange the languages by their potential number of users it then looks like this:

 

Keep in mind that for the sake of simplicity the numbers here represent only the population of native speakers, so a Korean who happens to be fluent in English or any other language will only count as 1 Korean. English is a language that benefits from an extremely wide L2 speaker pool that languages like Chinese do not have, and Spanish and French also have quite a bit of this too. Brazilians proficient in Spanish for example are expected to increase from the current approximately 5 million to 40 or 50 million in about a decade, and there are many L2 speakers of French throughout Europe (Romania for example) and other parts of the world.

Also, the amount of freedom citizens of a certain country have is also a big deciding factor too. Chinese has a large online presence but when the government of the largest group of speakers is able to completely cut citizens off from the internet when it wants, the online presence of the language suffers as well.

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