My school had Spanish, French, or German.
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.
English of course, the language of the invaders
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.
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.
I know my producer’s schools had only Spanish, though one school he went to had ASL (American Sign Language) in addition to Spanish. However, there was one college that offered Japanese, which he would have loved.
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
French, Spanish, and Latin.
Does English count in the USA? 😆
Considering the average USA reading level, might as well
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.
Australia, we were offered French, Indonesian (and perhaps german?) in the two schools i went to.
In my German “Gymnasium“, we had English, French, Latin and Russian.
In US, had French and Latin, plus of course English.
French and Spanish only at my first high school (NJ), and French, Spanish, and German at my second high school (PA so the inclusion of German makes sense).
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
In my hometown, it was Spanish, Latin, German, French, or ASL (I know, I know, not a foreign language. Arguably Spanish isn’t either, but anyway).
But each school only had one, so you only got fo choose if you had enough free periods to drive across town three times a week.
My school had Spanish. I learned Latin once I was in college.
They taught Welsh, French, and German when I was at school but they swapped German for Spanish a few years after I finished.
