Japanese is spoken as a native language by about 127 million people. This means that Japanese has more native speakers than German. However, not many people speak Japanese as a foreign language (1 million worldwide).
More interesting facts about the Japanese language
Japanese has no articles and only 11 consonants and 5 vowels.
Outside of Japan, the Japanese language is spoken primarily in the USA (400,000 speakers) and in South America (380,000 speakers).
The Japanese script is one of the most complicated writing systems in the world because it consists of three different scripts. One of them is based on the Chinese characters.
Japan consists of 3000 islands. The 4 largest islands make up 97% of the area of Japan.
