Most studied foreign languages in your country

[Levo]

What are the two, maximum three most studied foreign languages in your country, which are tipically taught in nearly all secondary-schools (or primary schools if education is so good in your country).

Hungary: English, German are the two most dominant, after them French is the third most popular.

I am interested in countries far away from Europe the most.

[Kubi]

In Germany it's English, French, and Latin. Recently Spanish is rapidly gaining ground, though.

[Tenebrarum]

English. Though Vietnamese native speakers rarely succeed in learning European languages, particularly when it comes to pronunciation. People just can't get consonant clusters, and it gets worse when the coda happens to be one.

[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.

[OCCASVS]

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

[Babelfish]

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.

[Sol Invictus]

In Latvian schools one has to learn two foreign languages at school, usually first is English, second is either Russian or German (i.e. normaly about half students of a class have to study German and the other half - Russian), these also are the most widely known foreign languages here. I'm quite sure that in minority schools Latvian is taught as foreign language, so that could be concidered widely studied too.

[Karavinka]

This is pointless

English rapes everything else, everywhere

[Mutusen]

But the title of the thread is “Most studied foreign languages in your country”.


In France, I guess: English, Spanish, German, Italian, maybe Chinese.

[loqu]

Here:

1. English
2. I'd say there is a tie between German and French, German slowly gaining ground and French losing
.........
15. Italian
....
.......
50. Arabic
.........
.............
121. Portuguese

nothing else.

[Lietmotiv]

I am the man with 2 countries here

Romania:
1st English
2nd French
3 German
4Russian and Spanish(dunno exactly;used to be Russian,now I think both are on the same position)
5 rest of them

Moldova
1.Russian
2.English
3.German/French

[Levo]

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...

[Alejo]

Hm, I would say that in the United States it would be Spanish, then French, then Latin. At least thats what I've noticed =/.

In my school, its Spanish, then French, then Latin (which may be beating French now because now Freshman get to choose to take Computers/Freshman Seminar or Latin instead), and then American Sign Language.

[Varislintu]

In Finland:

1. English
2. Swedish (due to legal circumstances, not actual popularity)
3. German
4. French

These four are the ones I'd say you can find dictionaries for in any small bookstore, and schools offer the most lengthy courses in them. After that, I think it is:

5. Spanish, Italian
6. Russian, Estonian

Although Russian might be more popular near the Russian border.

[Qrczak]

I found some statistics about languages learned in secondary schools in Poland (2001/2002):
1. English 77.8%
2. German 48.5%
3. Russian 13.2%
4. French 6.9%
I guess Spanish and Italian are next. Russian used to be more prominent until 15–20 years ago (I was taught Russian in the primary school in grades 5–8, i.e. 1988–1992).

[sa wulfs]

While it's true that German is growing in Spain, I'd say French still comes on top by far, in my experience. At uni, in the first year, about 15 of us took German, everybody else took French as their third language. And there's also a sizable amount of people who took French as their second language, while there wasn't even an option to take German. Italian, Arabic and Chinese were all popular choices for optative classes.

[KingHarvest]

Optative? Are you going Indo-European/Greek/Sanskrit moods on us now?

[sa wulfs]

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.

[kibo]

For Serbia 1) English 2) German 3) French 4) Russian. Purely empirical, I don't have any statistical verification.

[Quevenois]

In France it's

1. English (more than 99,99% of pupils study it, actually those who don't study it are exceptions)
2. Spanish
3. German (but the number of the pupils who study it is decreasing because the language is considered by many French teenagers as difficult and ugly-sounding)

After these I don't know, probably Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic... but I dunno in what order they should be put. Chinese is not that much taught actually.