English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Russian, Portuguese, Other.
An article on CNET (Japanese) details a survey ranking the "cool" quotient of foreign languages. The results come from a small sample of net users mainly between their twenties and forties. Asked about their current overseas language skills, 67.7% admitted they basically had none, 25.8% said they could handle a simple exchange while 6.5% said they were comfortable with daily conversation. Of those who claimed some ability, 92.1% had English, 9.4% Chinese and 5% German (the numbers don't sum to a hundred because some are presumably multilingual). Most speakers thought it was cool to have another language but, in general, the survey revealed that non-speakers valued having a language more than speakers - perhaps not a particularly surprising result. Those who thought it was cool favoured English as the preferred language by an overwhelming majority as the table above shows. The results show that Chinese, although a popular language to study, is regarded as less cool than Arabic and only slightly ahead of Korean. European languages are clear favourites and even Latin ranks higher than Arabic.
