My school had Spanish, French, or German.
They taught Welsh, French, and German when I was at school but they swapped German for Spanish a few years after I finished.
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.
In America it’s French, German and Spanish and in Panama it’s English and French.
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.
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 Spanish, French, German, American Sign Language, and Mandarin
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.
UK here. English, obviously. That’s it. Modern languages - either French or Spanish - were optional. It’s honestly embarrassing.
As a person from pacific, we could choose between Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and the local austronesian language, in addition to mandatory english, for high school.
Pacific economy relies a lot on tourism, and it mainly comes from Asia or America, so knowing how to talk to tourists can be handy.
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.
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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English of course, the language of the invaders
Irish and French. Irish was mandatory, French technically wasn’t but most (all?) universities required (require?) a passing grade in at least one foreign language regardless of the course. Anecdotally in Ireland most schools offered French or German as a foreign language.
Granted this was all many years ago so the system may have changed since.
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.
