My bad! I should’ve added an “other” option or do it like with the time zone poll and ask for closest area of living 
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It’s cool. There just may be some users whose countries/ continents aren’t listed. I still thought it was a good idea though 
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This is very interesting to think about! I’ve attended in person classes for Japanese, Spanish, German, Korean, and Russian. The only class that had a 50/50 ish split was German, and the only one that leaned heavily male was Russian. That is all really anecdotal based on my own experience, but the learner profile for each language I’ve come into contact with certainly has been different.
Also another very very anecdotal data point but the German learners I’ve met or interacted with were the least interested in reading books. A lot of the learning seemed focused around traditional methods or conversation practice. 
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I’ve noticed this as well. I happen to know quite a lot of German learners, and none of them are big readers, or at least not in their target language (unless you consider law textbooks, but that’s completely different from actually reading imo).
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Oh come on, I refuse to accept this! It’s been a while since I read anything in German, but you now make me want to start a book club 
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It checks out! 
Most learners I met were learning for studies or work and not for fun (myself included I guess), so I suppose that’s why they weren’t reading? I am sure there are some passionate German learners somewhere reading though. 
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The Japanese course where I went had far more male than female learners, ratio was about 3:1.
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Very cool! There was no book club when I last looked, and somehow I assumed this was still the case. I should totally unmute all those automatically muted language categories 
I think this was the case for the one beginner class I went to many years ago too. And I was the only one who wasn’t an anime fan. Everyone else seemed to have already picked up some vocabulary from anime, they looked so advanced to me back then 
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I am on the other end. My experience is people learning to be able to read philosophy. 
(But those are ppl not living in a German speaking county and not planning on moving there)
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I’ve only ever learned German in Germany and Austria so it definitely skews my sample data. 
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Fix, oida!
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Is this a reasonable poll? (Feel free to copy for other languages, anyone.)
Would you participate in a Dutch book club?
- Yes
- No
- Maybe
- Only advanced
- Only intermediate
- Only beginner
0
voters
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I studied a bit of Dutch, once upon a time. Haven’t retained any of it, sadly.
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It’s pretty rare, sadly, even though Dutch (imo) has some of the all-time best words in existence. (Like eg “smoezelig”. Just off the top of my head.)
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Dutch was competing with Swedish as my “give it a whirl” language and Swedish won out simply by having more accessible audiobooks at the time I was doing research. I really do love the look and sound of the language though.
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I wonder if this has something to do with how it seems to be taught since the people I know who studied German were never advised to read in their target language but those who studied French were (sounds silly but I never put 2+2 together and I for some reason thought reading in a target language wasn’t a good idea until after you’d learned the language).
I was “taught” (using the term loosely because I remember very little) German in high school and reading was never something that was encouraged unless it was the textbook. I do think that if I’d had reading materials I might have had a better time of understanding and remembering it. It is a language that is on my list to learn, partly because I was quite interested in it when I was in school and partly because somewhere I do have some books in German I’d like to read.
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Huh, that’s strange. I guess it might depend on the country, but I “learned” German in junior high/high school, and we did have to read stuff as assignments in high school. Arguably, it was short stuff (because we would get print outs, so I assume that there was a logistical issue here) until the last year, where we read a full novel. That’s how I have one (1) novel logged in German on Natively 
Now, I do agree that reading a novel in ~8 months isn’t breakneck speed, but the teacher did recommend to read native content on the side as well. (Maybe I was just lucky? That didn’t really help, though, as my score average was 8/20 and I think I have forgotten everything by this point)
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My husband is working against all the anecdotal evidence by being a (male) German learner who reads a lot of books
He also reads very intensively, so still looking every word up (which is not a lot anymore and often words that even I am not really familiar with if it’s a book that is a bit older – or they are really “German German” and not really used in Austria) although he reached native like fluency imho. He is also interested in philosophy and is regularly reading stuff, regardless of it being in English or German, that is probably always above the levels I am reading books in. Plus, I am on the opposite side of the spectrum, I am always too lazy for looking things up as soon as I get the gist of things
We did one of those “how big is your English vocabulary” tests a while ago (with us both not being native speaker but regularly reading/watching stuff/working in English, although in my workplace we speak way more English than at his) and his English vocabulary size was huge compared to mine. I can’t remember the exact number but it was even for native speakers in the top range. Granted, it was just a silly online test, but since he reads sooo intensively I wonder if this is what sets us apart. Or maybe because he reads more complicated books than me? Regardless, I don’t think that I would ever start reading as intensively as him or reading more complicated philosophy.
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