My school had Spanish, French, or German.
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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. And, Quebec still 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.
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.
Australia, we were offered French, Indonesian (and perhaps german?) in the two schools i went to.
Hungary had Russian all the way up to around 1993 as mandatory language classes in elementary grade 5-8 and high school grades 9-12. Starting about 1989 though a lot of schools got the option to replace it with either German or English. Due to the proximity of Austria and Germany, a lot of students opted for German back then. This trend continued until the ubiquity of the Internet, when English gradually overtook German.
In Germany I had English starting grade five elementary during the late 80s.
My kids are having English as their language classes in Quebec.
English of course, the language of the invaders
In my German “Gymnasium“, we had English, French, Latin and Russian.
I’ve been always surprised that Spanish is not as relevant as it should be in the German system, as for the german speakers it’s really easy to pick up and master, also Mallorca is practically a german city.
I’m not sure I would agree, maybe it’s a regional thing or a generational thing (mid 20s here), but every school I know of here in germany offered spanish as a 3rd language
That‘s true. On the contrary, having taken French and Latin, I picked up basic Spanish and Italian almost on the go, when visiting these countries.
Also French is prioritised as it’s out direct neighbour.
Yes but Italy is also a neighboring country. I blame the Big French corpos
Italy and Germany do not have a common border.
Ah shit! You got me. Then polish and czech?
US.
Spanish, French, and Latin as an independent study. It was a Catholic high school. At least one of the public schools in the area had German and another had Russian.
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.
We had to choose 2 of English, German, Spanish, French, Italian. We had the option of Japanese as extracurricular
In America it’s French, German and Spanish and in Panama it’s English and French.
Mandatory:
- Danish (Native)
- English
- German
- Other Nordic languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic (as part of Danish class)
Optional:
- French
- Spanish
- Latin (mandatory on certain schools)
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)
Grade school was bilingual english/spanish. Middle school english as a second language/ancient greek and latin. Some russian and italian lessons but nothing special since it was not the main focus. German language school all the way starting in grade school ending in college but this was an extracurricular my parents signed us up apart from school. We moved around a lot but the school stuff stayed pretty much the same.
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.
