My school had Spanish, French, or German.
As a Japanese native, the only foreign language I studied at school was basically English.
However, as part of my ancient Japanese language education, I studied classical Chinese literature written in Chinese characters, from which hiragana and other Japanese characters are derived, so ancient Chinese might also be included in the list of foreign languages I learned.
I did grammar school, so we had:
- Dutch (our native language)
- English
- French
- German
- Classical Greek
- Latin
- Chinese (optional course)
Dutch and English were all through school, the other ones you took for 2 years and then picked two languages to follow through on, one of which had to be Greek or Latin. I did German and Greek.
English of course, the language of the invaders
In America it’s French, German and Spanish and in Panama it’s English and French.
As a German:
- English mandatory from the beginning
- Mandatory choice between Latin and French in 6th grade, Latin possible until 10th/11th grade (EF) and French possible until graduation
- Russian and Spanish possible from EF until graduation
- Korean and Japanese offered as extracurricular activities (Korean was taught by the parent of a student and stopped when said student graduated, Japanese was offered by a teacher who was a weeb so we mostly just watched anime (I think the only thing we actually learned was how to introduce ourselves), but it only started being offered 6 months before Covid shut everything down, don’t know if she continued offering it afterwards)
We had to choose 2 of English, German, Spanish, French, Italian. We had the option of Japanese as extracurricular
Man I wish we had japanese when I was in school. I was completely unmotivated to learn french, and yet I still manage to understand some basic sentences. I bet I would have been way more motivated and probably would have remembered more if I had the option to learn japanese.
Mine didn’t even have French all the way through - you had to do it by correspondence or go the the local French immersion school. Which is barely constitutional in Canada.
Can you elaborate on the constitutionality of that to an American.
IIRC the right to education in either official language is in there. Ditto for other government services. Language rights are serious business in Canada.
The country started as a pretty forced union between the Quebec, populated by Francophones, and upper Canada which was full of Loyalist refugees and escaped slaves and things. Keeping the peace between the sides was paramount if the British wanted to keep their united bulwark against American expansion going. Even so, Quebec came pretty close to separating a couple times in the late 20th century.
Stuff like free speech and basic human rights is actually in a separate, later document.
My school was all boys and when we asked how it was legal to discriminate based on gender, they said that in this instance they are not saying girls can’t go to school and other options were available to girls who wanted to go to private schools.
With that being said, I’m not sure the logic makes total sense, but there were two all girl schools about a block away.
My middle school had English, German, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek.
That sounds amazing. In my high school I was the only one who signed up for Latin so they put me in Spanish instead…
Everybody picked English as first or second foreign language. Most picked Spanish as second language, the best students (or kids from solidly middle-class families) picked German as a first language, to get into the “good” group. Latin was an elective for nerds, Geek for Über-nerds.
Spanish is most common, but many high schools also teach French, Latin, and German.
Fun times when my German teacher had the idea of showing up to the French class cookout uninvited (there were only 6 of us, cf. 12 students in French)
ASL, Greek, Italian, Russian, and Japanese were only offered at specific schools in my district, with a bus that takes you to those classes and back. Japanese ended up being just a TV broadcast alongside worksheets and was eventually dropped from the catalog. Friends and family living in larger cities and suburbs told me about taking Mandarin Chinese, but the school district I attended (and neighboring districts) didn’t offer it.
edit: this is in the US
Mandatory:
- Danish (Native)
- English
- German
- Other Nordic languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic (as part of Danish class)
Optional:
- French
- Spanish
- Latin (mandatory on certain schools)
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Spanish, French, German, Latin, and if you wanted to learn Italian, you could go to the sister school in the morning for that class and then come back by bus.
We had Spanish, French, German, American Sign Language, and Mandarin
In my US public school: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Latin
Edit: just checked their website to see what they do now, AP level French Spanish, Italian. And apparently have an ASL class. No more Russian
I don’t remember what my middle school had, but my high school has Spanish, French, and Japanese. I don’t remember why, but Japanese interested me, and this was before I even knew anime was really a genre of animation. As in I’d obviously seen it in the past but didn’t recognize it as anime.
