[Niko]

Japanese is the No.1 Language in Far East Asia

For a group of Chinese and Korean students taking a beginner-level class at the Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo, learning Japanese is far more than memorising vocabulary.

Having greeted their teacher and sailed through a few reading drills, they are soon lost in the linguistic maze that makes Japanese one of the most intriguing and infuriating languages in the world.

Usually, the thousands of people who take up Japanese studies every year, are pleasantly surprised to find a language whose pronunciation is not nearly as challenging as they had feared. They find also that is has a mercifully simple grammatical structure. Yet just over a decade ago, the bursting of Japan's economic "bubble" was followed by predictions that Chinese would replace Japanese as the target language for those with an interest in studying or doing business in the Far East.

Japanese has weathered the storm. At the end of 2003, an estimated 2.4 million people were studying Japanese overseas, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs. In Japan, the number of students stood at over 135,000, the vast majority of them (82%) from other parts of Asia. At more than 28,000, the number of teachers has risen 2.5 times in the past decade.

Students taking up the study of Japanese is increasing year by year. This is more evident in places such as Australia, Hawaii and Canada, where Japanese holiday makers frequent.