Most studied foreign languages in your country

[KingHarvest]

You know, I've translated it as "optative" for years and I never once suspected that could be wrong, so I never bothered to check a dictionary. Shame on you, people.
Okay, optional class.

An "elective" is the term we use (possibly the British call it something else?).

[dorenda]

In the Netherlands English is taught at all primary schools, English, German, and French are taught at all secondary schools.

[Eoghan]

In Sweden this would be a fairly correct list;

1. English

2. German / Spanish or French, currently German is going through a revival after years of decline while Spanish grew popular...

Immigrant languages are taught in all schools al over Sweden, Finnish being the biggest one so I would guess something like;

3. Finnish
4. Arabic
...

In Finland, Swedish is the most popular foreign language

[Varislintu]

In Finland, Swedish is the most popular foreign language

Not popular . It's the law that Finnish speaking schools must teach it and all students must take it, so they do. Most Finnish speakers think it's utterly useless.

[Eoghan]

In Finland, Swedish is the most popular foreign language

Not popular . It's the law that Finnish speaking schools must teach it and all students must take it, so they do. Most Finnish speakers think it's utterly useless.

Okay, but I was just happy to see that Swedish actually ranked higher than English in the lists from Finland - and about being useless; most Finnish people know at least some Swedish, most Swedes cannae even say "en ymmerä" in Finnish

[skye]

Without looking at any statistics I can say that it's English.

German is probably still in the second place, but it is losing ground. It is still the first foreign language in some schools in North-eastern Slovenia, but those schools have been starting to switch to English too - because it's more useful for the students.

German is often the second foreign language as well - especially in those schools where they are not able to offer a choice. In those schools where they do offer a choice between several foreign languages Spanish is gaining ground since it is very popular among the young people at the moment. If it were up to them only I think Spanish would already be second. Besides German, schools usually offer Italian or French (but in certain schools they have other languages too).

[Javier]

In Ecuador:

1. English -> to be able to speak it it's the dream of everyone, and it's the most popular as it's a common belief this skill is able to land you in a good job, or have a great economical impact in life. An interesting point is that people is not used to hear or doesn't care about any other dialect of English than the U.S. ones. You won't get any teaching material in U.K or Australian's English, for example.

2. French *
3. Italian / German *

They are in 2. and 3. place because there is nothing in between, but the popularity rate is in a >90% to < 5% ratio, as people would learn them only if there is a good reason (possibility to study in Europe, having parents, be able to travel, being an Unilanger , etc)

What really surprises me it's why Portuguese is not popular at all (you won't find easily any material or course to learn it), as this is one of the four main language of the Americas.

[JackFrost]

Canada: For anglophone regions, French. For francophone regions, English (especially in Quebec and New Brunswick). But those aren't truely foreign languages since both are official in the country and it's mandatory for students to learn either one that is not their native tongue. So we don't have a choice really. In Quebec, it's mandatory for francophone students to start learning English by grade 4. Anglophone students would learn French a little earlier (I think), but many of them already know French due to interactions in the Quebecois society where French is everywhere. For other provinces, I have no idea apart from French immersion programs and New Brunswick bilingual education in areas where both languages co-exist.

As for true foreign languages... I'd say Spanish, then German, and finally Italian. Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian are common on the courselist in universities.

[Karavinka]

A handful of third language options are available for the highschool students in South Korea, and this is the distribution of languages as taken by the students for the College Scholastic Ability Test. However, the "Fifth Period" or the third languages (or what they call "Secondary Foreign Language") is optional altogether; about 20% of the students take the test. The tests are curved; and a lot of strategic behaviour is involved - many students deliberately avoid the competition in Japanese, for example. (To land in the highest stratum in this Japanese test, the only safe bet is the perfect score.)

As of 2001:

Japanese: 34.7%
German: 30.8%
French: 23.6%
Chinese: 9.0%
Spanish: 1.5%
Russian: 0.4%

As of 2009

Japanese: 35.15%
Classical Chinese: 19.76%
Chinese: 15.72%
Arabic: 15.23%
French: 5.44%
German: 5.11%
Spanish: 2.15%
Russian: 1.43%

The general trend you see is pretty obvious - Japanese rules supreme, European languages greatly fell out of favour, and Chinese arose.

The fall of German is the most remarkable. In the earlier years (up to even 80s and mid-90s) Japanese and German were almost the only languages available in most schools.

Personally I can't believe Arabic; it was introduced only a few years ago, and many students thought it to be an "easy" option - less competition, lower marks can land you a higher stratum, and it became the choice language for many budding game theorists. I suspect that's what a good chunk of these people are doing; the actual interest in Arabic would be less. (To prove that, there is as yet no highschool with a regular Arabic teacher. They study on their own and write the test - why does this happen? Well, don't ask me... The secondary education in South Korea is a fairly complex issue.)

Note: English isn't here because it is mandatory.

[darkina]

Italy: English, French, Spanish/German in that order.

I think French is losing ground though.
Spanish came up in the past 10 years or so.

This is pointless

English rapes everything else, everywhere

Absolutely not, in Hungary, English became predominant only in the last 3-4 years. Before that German was the number one as for the statistics, and not long ago English was one of the secret languages which was let only for a few to study and there was Russian dominance.
And if you watch the question, it is not about the number 1, but the first 2 or three...

Every time I've been to Budapest, especially the first couple of times, it seemed easier to find people (like waiters etc) that could speak German than English. Sometimes they had great German and broken English. But I think it's visible lately that things are changing
(wow can you believe I haven't been to Hungary for more than 3 years now!)

[null]

in China:

1 英语
2 日语
3 俄语
4 法语
5 德语
6 朝鲜语/韩语
7 西班牙语
8 阿拉伯语


1 English
2 Japanese
3 Russian
4 French
5 German
6 Korean
7 Spanish
8 Arabic

[Lynch]

Israel: English of course Starting from fourth grade or so, I think.
After that, I'm not 100% sure; when I was studying I had to choose b/w French and Arabic, that was 15 years ago, but my sister (who's younger than me by two years) already had to learn Arabic. In recent years schools offer many less-traditional lessons, such as psychology or photography, as well as very-foreign languages such as Chinese. I don't know if Arabic is still obligatory.

I finished high school in Israel in 2002 and we had to take Arabic for three years in middle school. For immigrants from the former Soviet Union there was a Russian option, which was sort of a native speakers class I guess. No French option at my school (Ort system). When I was in fourth grade we started studying English in class, today's Israeli children start at third grade. Arab majority schools within Israel start learning Hebrew from 1st grade.

In high school we had the option to advance to an English native speaker program and finish our high school exit exam (bagrut) in English in 10th grade instead of in 12th grade.

[Aurinĭa]

for Flanders:
1) French: mandatory from age 10-18 (8 years)
2) English: mandatory from age 13-18 (some schools start a year earlier, so 5 or 6 years)
3) German: mandatory for most students from age 15-16 (1 year mandatory for most; depending on what your main points of study are, students have 1 or 3 years of German)
4) Spanish: not mandatory (only offered in some schools, students can then in the last 2 years of secundary school choose between German and Spanish)
If German wasn't mandatory and Spanish was offered in more schools, I wouldn't be surprised if they were in the reverse order.

Latin: quite popular and on the rise, but I have no idea of the numbers of students following Latin. Can be taken between age 12-18 (6 years)
Ancient Greek: can be taken from age 13-18 (5 years; not offered in all schools, no idea about its popularity) I just wish they had had it at my school, because I really wanted to learn it!

[Zorba]

In the UK:

(1) French
(2) Spanish (recently knocked German off the no. 2 spot)
(3) German

As is the case with most English-speaking countries, the Brits have a very poor record when it comes to learning foreign languages. Most have a smattering of French but very few could hold a basic conversation in French.

Basically people learn these languages because they are compulsory at school. It is a national requirement to study one foreign language between the ages of 11 and 14, but many individual schools insist on more than this. For example, my school required me to take at least 5 years of French, 2 years of Latin and 1 year of either Spanish, German or more Latin. It is very rare indeed to find people actually learning languages for pleasure or in any context outside of school in the UK.

Additionally, Welsh is now compulsory in all schools in Wales, and many Roman Catholic schools in Northern Ireland require or offer Irish Gaelic.

There is no great demand for other languages: Latin is still taught in many private schools and a handful of state schools; a very small percentage of language enthusiasts study Italian, Russian, Greek etc.; interest is growing slowly in languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, but again only among a miniscule percentage of the society.

I am greatly in favour of exploiting the potential of immigrants as language teachers, especially when one immigrant group in dominant in a particular area. For example, there are lots of Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians in my part of the country now: why not train some of them up to be teachers? The locals will learn a little about the immigrant culture through the lessons and this might lead to better understanding in our communities, and perhaps help defeat some of the mindless racism and intolerance that persist among too many of the locals.

[ILuvEire]

Spanish, French, German in that order. Every child learns some amount of Spanish in primary school, then later you can change to French, German, Latin, Mandarin, Japanese, or Sign Language. We also have "native classes" in Vietnamese and Spanish (more depending on the amount of exchange students).

The native classes are so cool! I helped my German teacher in her native German class (there's only 10 exchange students and 3 immigrants!) They read advanced literature and watch movies and stuff in the native language.

I noticed some people gave a language timeline, here's ours:
[Elementary] Grades K-6 Mandatory Spanish/Sign Language
[Junior High] Grades 7-8 Optional Spanish (Other optional languages-I went to a small school so the only language they offered was Spanish)
[High] Grades 9-10 Mandatory Spanish/French/Latin/German I and II
[High] Grades 11-12 Optional Spanish/French/Latin/German III and IV or optional Mandarin/Sign Language/Japanese I and II

In Elementary school, we had Music/Sign Language (we sang and learned sign language, somewhat random, no?) on Monday, and Wednesday, then Spanish on Tuesday and Thursday and Art on Friday.
Ahh! So much capitalization!

The sign language classes weren't much, we learned tons of vocabulary and fingerspelling. Same thing for the Spanish classes, just the present tense and tons of vocabulary. Which is why I don't list that language in my profile.

[Alejo]

Spanish, French, German in that order. Every child learns some amount of Spanish in primary school, then later you can change to French, German, Latin, Mandarin, Japanese, or Sign Language. We also have "native classes" in Vietnamese and Spanish (more depending on the amount of exchange students).

The native classes are so cool! I helped my German teacher in her native German class (there's only 10 exchange students and 3 immigrants!) They read advanced literature and watch movies and stuff in the native language.

I noticed some people gave a language timeline, here's ours:
[Elementary] Grades K-6 Mandatory Spanish/Sign Language
[Junior High] Grades 7-8 Optional Spanish (Other optional languages-I went to a small school so the only language they offered was Spanish)
[High] Grades 9-10 Mandatory Spanish/French/Latin/German I and II
[High] Grades 11-12 Optional Spanish/French/Latin/German III and IV or optional Mandarin/Sign Language/Japanese I and II

In Elementary school, we had Music/Sign Language (we sang and learned sign language, somewhat random, no?) on Monday, and Wednesday, then Spanish on Tuesday and Thursday and Art on Friday.
Ahh! So much capitalization!

The sign language classes weren't much, we learned tons of vocabulary and fingerspelling. Same thing for the Spanish classes, just the present tense and tons of vocabulary. Which is why I don't list that language in my profile.

Interesting about the mandatory ASL thing. My school is more like this:
[Elementary] Grades K-6 Mandatory Spanish
[Junior High] Mandatory Spanish/French I
[High] 9-11 Mandatory Spanish II-IV, French II-IV, Latin I-III(Optional ASL I as an elective is avaliable beginning 10th, but it doesn't count as a LOTE credit)
[High] 12 Optional Spanish V, AP, or SUPA(SUNY credit course), French V, AP, and optional ASL I-III, we don't offer a Latin IV or AP so chances are if you took it as a Freshman, there'd be no level you may advance to.

Our French program is absolutely the worst one in the country(We only have one teacher for all the French classes in my High School). I don't know any French, but my friend is from Biarritz and took AP French for an easy 100 and said the teacher taught the weirdest pronunciation he ever heard, has horrible grammar, and uses outdated/completely made up vocabulary. The Spanish program is actually really good, especially the Honors and AP classes, probably because all the teachers are native, except one who is married to a man from Uruguay and studied there for a few years. The Latin program is supposed to be horrible because the teacher wishes she was teaching Greek instead and she even changed the Latin Club to the 'Youth Classical League', whatever that is . And our ASL classes are...ok. We learned to converse a lot, but the teacher talked about gossip and celebrities at least half the period. I can talk to a Deaf person reasonably well, but my vocabulary is a little lacking, except if we are talking about movies or actresses .

[Sheidhaf]

There is no mandatory language class where I live whatsoever except for one year of language required for graduation in High School. Our middle school offers only Spanish, and an extremely terrible class at that. The High School French class is a joke, apparently and only the first year is worth anything at all. The Spanish class is okay, but German is the only good language course offered here. That's mostly because the one German teach is really good and a lot of people in high places around the country know her.

[jaybee]

In Saudi:
1) English
2) English
3) English
4) Spanish/French (not sure which is more popular)

English is mandatory throughout all school levels. Some schools give French as an elective.

[Aurinĭa]

And our ASL classes are...ok. We learned to converse a lot, but the teacher talked about gossip and celebrities at least half the period. I can talk to a Deaf person reasonably well, but my vocabulary is a little lacking, except if we are talking about movies or actresses .

So cool that you can learn sign language at school!

[Mikael]

We have no language requirements at my school. You could graduate without stepping foot in a single foreign language class. The administration recommends 3 years of a foreign language to prepare for college, but many who follow this path quit as soon as the third year is done.

Our school offers Spanish, French, and Latin. The students at my school study them in that order.