I’ve been studying almost 15 years here! 
I’ve been learning Korean for a way shorter amount of time, but having advanced Japanese is kind of a cheat code for learning a lot quickly so it doesn’t count. 
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Yeah, I think it’s a difficult thing to measure because there are a lot of factors to consider. It’s common when learning a language to have false starts and periods of not interacting with it, as well as periods of intense study, so it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact start date. 
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So true. I have my learning methods down so well right now that I’m kinda amazed how quickly I’m progressing in French. But I also spent 5 years researching and experimenting with methods in Japanese and other languages, so now I know what works for me and what I will enjoy enough to do for the long run. Also there’s something like a 30% vocabulary overlap of English with French which isn’t hurting my progress at all!.
From my very first interest in Japanese study (my friend translating song lyrics for me to read when I was singing along) to now it’s been something like 25 years. I had 4 years of university instruction, a ton of manga reading with an electric dictionary in my teens and 20s, some random one off conversation classes, and a really unfortunate experience with ajatt that burned me out so hard I gave up on Japanese for 5 years. It feels like the last 3-5 years of reading and watching TV are the only thing that has helped, but university courses especially gave me a foundation in kanji that made reading a lot more feasible for me once I found books at my level.
tl;dr 6+ years, but I have no idea how I’d quantify my study time.
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Absolutely, no question. Also that’s cool! (I took Latin in high school, and it definitely helped the next time I tried to learn a language)
I think you can just edit and add the options, if you want
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It seems poll options are locked after a while, couldn’t even modify the title 
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Really? I’d swear I’ve edited/seen them edited before. 残念
You are not allowed to edit a poll after someone has voted, I believe. Otherwise people might vote for option A and then the poll maker could edit A to say B.
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Not a single Gryffindor among 14 voters, gotta love it 
No surprise about the high Ravenclaw percentage though in a community centered around learning.
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They’re too busy going on an adventure and whatnot to answer polls.
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I didn’t reply to the HP question, because I don’t know. I am surprised so many do know. Guess it’s an age thing. 
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Wondering about age. Most and about half are 30-39. Why not 20-29 or something? Does it stem from the time usually needed to learn a language, to practically read something?
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@omk3 this is very cool!! 
It actually is pretty inline with what I was expecting… although I was probably expecting it to lean even more female (men don’t seem to read as much these days…).
They’re probably all on discord 
. To be frank, I’m not sure, but it definitely feels accurate to the general discourse here. It does feel a bit more mature than the discord communities I interact with, for better or worse 
I’d actually be curious on language learning in general. I could see advanced language learners as tending towards late 20s, 30s, 40s, but not sure.
I swear not to look 
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This poll doesn’t cover my country but I think this is a good poll to see where most of the users of this site are from 
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It’s part of my job role but more fixing the issues that happen with the devices the company sells to the public or that happen as a result of customer misuse of the product than creating systems or coding etc (though I do want to learn code properly at some point).
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I could imagine so, it seems that while other platforms have mostly more recent learners who are still riding the beginner waves, here it seems to have already bottlenecked out towards the more long term learners.
If we can correlate the age poll with the language experience poll then it would make sense that the older age groups are more represented in combination with learners with at least 3 years of learning experience. Could be that most people started learning in their twenties and are now in their thirties.
Edit: in regard to the gender distribution, I would like to add some other anecdotal observations. I joined a community college class for both Spanish and Japanese and it’s always the majority female. In Spanish it’s 2 male, 6 female, in Japanese it’s all female for the last 2 classes (~8 participants).
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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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