East Asian languages on 43Things

Recently I’ve been browsing around the site 43Things, which lets users set goals and publicly work towards them with encouragement from others. I had a look at how many people have set learning Chinese, Japanese and Korean as their goals.

The results:

I’m not surprised at the ranking, especially for Korean being last. But the lead that Japanese has on Chinese and Korean is huge! I was expecting there to be a slight difference between Japanese and Chinese, with Korean some way behind. Instead it’s more like Chinese and Korean are in one league and Japanese is in another all to itself.

It’s now set me thinking where I could get hold of more general statistics about the number of people studying these languages. That would be very hard, though, as I can’t see there being a centralised source of data on this anywhere.