Hawker College

Tamil is spoken by approximately 77 million people. Tamil language is a member of the Dravidian language family, spoken in India and is also an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore. Tamil is also recognised as a classical language. There is a large community of Tamil speakers in Australia.

Spanish is spoken by more than 570 million people. It is a Romance language and shares its Latin origins with several other European languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. It is the official language in more than 20 countries and is spoken by a growing number of people.

Korean is spoken as a first language by more than 80 million people, according to Ethnologue. It is one of the four key Asian languages for Australian languages education. As a language using the phonetic Hangual system, the Korean alphabet makes Korean easier to learn.

Japanese is spoken by more than 120 million people. The written language uses three kinds of scripts – Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The third of these has much in common with Chinese character script. Japan has a rich cultural tradition. It has the third-largest economy in the world.

Indonesian is spoken by more than 250 million people –and is the language of our closest large neighbouring country it is also closely related to Malaysian. Indonesian is easier for English speakers to learn than some other Asian languages, because it uses the same script as English.