About this weeks poll, I have not heard the term L2 used like this before. I know what it is in computer terms but here I guess it stands for your second language, correct? A little strange formulation since most of us here probably have several languages under our belts. I guess the question is about music in Chinese and or Japanese. I would say that for me 2% of my music is in Swedish, 60% in English ,30% Chinese and 8% Japanese. German music have never interested me (Sorry Germans) and other Scandinavian music I categorized in the Swedish category.

Ah, good guess. I had no idea.

Yes, it's jargon, and particularly unhelpful jargon in this case as it's ambiguous.

If the question is about music in Chinese, my answer is zero. I'm still looking for some good music with lyrics in Chinese. The best Chinese music I've found so far is instrumental. MC Hotdog is probably the best I've heard so far that had vocals, but I wasn't tempted to add any of his music to my collection.

James

Mainstream Chinese and Japanese seldom appeals to us westerners but there are in fact a lot of very nice underground music and really good rock and rap music. Fun to listen to live but usually hard to get in any shops. Whenever you are in Asia i recommend to visit some of all of those rock clubs that pops up. MC Hotdog is mostly bad language without substance to me so no such music in my pods. Right now I am in to an Chinese minority music period. Visited an minority music festival last week and found a lot of strange but still interesting music. Now I am heading for an Ayumi Hamasaki Karaoke evening with friends so this will be fun:-)(My Japanese s...s) I am still rehearsing "evolution" by her http://www.myvideo.de/watch/7178187/Ayumi_Hamasaki_evolution_PV It is not that bad in fact once you get used to it. Or maybe I just have been in Japan to long.

Speaking about Karaoke, A very easy song in Chinese that always makes success when we westerns try to sing it in Chinese is the the song "superstar" by She (kindergarten pop) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRyNc8rCDI0 Try that, My daughters love it and I use it whenever they forces me to sing in China. Or why not Pan Long (male): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deYHb4e6raY also easy to sing.

I have a lot of Japanese music, but I already had tons of English before I started learning Japanese. I maybe have 5% Japanese music tops. But if you're asking what percentage of the listening I do is Japanese music, it's probably in the nineties. So I wasn't sure how to answer.

When I'm at home (in Shanghai), I have either radio or tv switched on. As I am living in a typical Chinese compound, I have more than 60 stations on cable tv, but all of them are Chinese (except the CCTV English channel). My favourite radio station is LoveRadio from Shanghai, you can hear it also on the internet: http://tunein.com/radio/Shanghai-Love-Radio-1037-s55564/ . So I'm getting very used to it and I like Chinese music and films very much; same for my wife (she's German, too). She's an absolute fan of Andy Lau, both in movies and as singer. Her No 1 in the moment is his album Unforgettable, Concert 2010, and the movie Shaolin.
By the way, I agree with Mandarinboy, as Europeans, Chinese is our L2++ language.

I thought the question indicated a failure to understand what a computer's L2 cache/memory is. I answered 0-25%, because an L2 cache is too small to contain significant amounts of music.

I agree with Roland. If poll goal was to determine, whether skritters are trying to listen songs in chinese, or still prefer english, then it is a question for europeans. Morever, like for example, Roland's German case(by the way, a same name like me :), just I have an "S" at the end, a way, how latvian names are constructed. Then I really do not know how to answer correctly on a poll, since, i have been experiencing dual L1 since early days - Latvian% Russian, (i am using russian as translation language in skritter, however, before when it was not yet launched, english was ok too.) Then, for the "songs" as such, i have most of them english, if consider the "PC's" hard disk, but I will sometimes browse youtube for russian and even latvian songs. Now, how should I answer the poll? :)

for e.g. my native language is Dutch, but most of the time I listen to English, which is my L2 then? I don't see how everyone is supposed to know what L2 is ;-)
If L2 is about my Chinese, well then it's basically still 0,0001%.

I think the poll could be 'What percent of your music collection is Japanese and/or Chinese'

I thought L2 was some hipster way to say "laptop" or perhaps and Android mobile phone model I had not heard of yet. Too cryptic.

Never heard of the term myself, but I am not the type of person to pay attention to lyrics in any language, thus my collection spans many languages. KTV however...

It would be fun to start tracking the poll confusion rate for when I word the poll vs. when George words the poll. Then again, I don't want to have to start coming up with all the polls.

You can just add a "WTF?" option to every poll. ;)

^^
hahaha I second that.

I actually want to vote "WTF?" on the new poll, but now googled 'swag' and I think Skritter swag means the appearance of the site, the lay-out.

@Elwin no, swag in this context is merchandise; T-shirts and mugs with the Skritter logo, for instance.

"Swag" is a word thieves and pirates used to use for their ill-gotten gains, and it later turned into a term for free stuff that people would get at promotional events. Now it often means promotional branded merchandise.

I should mention that I'm American and, since the word is somewhat slangy, the meaning might be different in other English-speaking countries.

James

Cool, thanks! I heard the word before in movies I guess, but it kind of felt to me similar to the word 'stuff', turns out it's a little better than just 'stuff'

In American slang, swag has also come to mean how cool you are. Everybody likes the person with swag! I also interpreted Skritter swag in the same way Elwin did. But now I know a new meaning for it as well!

All I can say, guys, is that I had a few good belly laughs with this whole discussion! Only reason I know what on earth L2 means is I worked as conference interpreter for a long time. But after reading all the posts above, I had to remind myself it wasn't a computer memory division. But hey! This is the way we build vocabulary! 100% valid. Swag was a great acquisition!

L2 is an applied linguistics abbreviation, and refers to any secondary language acquired. One's mother tongue is an L1, and one can have multiple L2s.