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submitted 2 days ago by may_be@thelemmy.club to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

i'm in the usa and my school has german, spanish and french. i'm taking spanish all 4 years of high school and german starting this autumn.

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[-] Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 14 hours ago

Brazil, in the 90s. It changed from school to school. I had English for my final 6 years in school (high school was 3 years), but it was mostly useless - nobody learned any English at all in school. We would just go over the same content multiple times - the usual joke was that the only thing we learned was the "to be" verb, but most kids didn't even understand that despite studying it every year.

The current mayor is pushing us to connect more with our twin city in Germany so he managed to add German classes as extra curricular to one of our schools, but after a year it has already changed and now the town simply pays for German classes in a private school for the ones who want it (probably less than 20 kids).

[-] Noctambulist@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Germany at a secondary school, grades 5–13:

  • from grade 5: Latin (at least 6 years)
  • from grade 7: English (at least 4 years)
  • from grade 9: French or Ancient Greek (optional)
  • from grade 11: Spanish or Italian or Hebrew (optional)

That was about 20 years ago and learning Latin, let alone Ancient Greek, had become the exception even then.

[-] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I grew up in Hungary and Germany, and lived most of my early adulthood in Hungary. Later in life I moved to Québec, where I reside now.

In Germany, I had English starting grade five.

In Hungary, Russian was mandatory until 1989. After '89 it was elective between Russian, German, English or, in some schools, French. I opted for German starting grade 6 at a German ethnicity school, but felt like it was a mistake, since I was already native level, but the (non-native) teachers kept trying to one-up me in their broken knowledge of the language. Starting grade eight I've transferred to a school that had Russian only, but since I had no prior knowledge of it, but already spoke German and English, I was exempted from it. In high school I've opted for English.

My kids go to French language schools in Montréal and have English as a foreign language. We speak English at home. Almost ten years in and I still don't speak French. My kids don't speak either Hungarian or German.

Just like the other Canadian poster's daughter in this thread stated, my wife learned near native level French, even as a non-Québecois, simply on the premise of Canada supposedly being a bilingual country. This seems to hold a lot of truth in Ontario, Montréal and New Brunswick, but outside of these provinces and cities, it seems to be much more mono-lingual in practice. Montréal is truly wild though. People very often speak three or more languages here.

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Netherlands, it depends on the level and where you live:

  • everyone: Dutch and English, and another language for 2 years
  • higher¹ education: French and German, drop one or both after 3 years, keeping the other for another 1 or 2 years
  • for kids that are still bored: +Latin, Greek, or Spanish as typical choices (depends what your regional school offers)
  • in the province of Frysia, Frysian is mandatory
  • in the overseas territories, it can be different again. Not all of them speak Dutch primarily, some don't follow the Dutch education system. I tried looking it up but couldn't easily find how it works in those regions (which may be a "country within the kingdom" or a "special municipality", depending on the island)
  • the existence of sign language did not come up, that I recall. So far as I can find, it's only offered on schools specifically for kids that have some level of hearing disability

¹ "higher" is the term that is officially used. I find it a bit derogatory. Having done some of basically every education level, each one has strengths and it's not like everyone from the "highest" one would be able to get a diploma on the "lowest" one. They're just different. Idk what word is commonly understood for this

[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 5 points 2 days ago

korea, mostly english but we also have basic chinese or japanese classes for a year or two

[-] CobraCommander@quokk.au 4 points 2 days ago

In Australia I had Indonesian.

[-] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

i am in the u.s. my high school (~ 40 years ago) offered spanish, french, german, and swedish. the district had asl classes but that was outside of school and open to the community. juniors and seniors could take classes at a nearby college, which opened up other language choices.

[-] JayJLeas@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

I'm in Australia, we had French or Japanese. I took Japanese.

[-] may_be@thelemmy.club 2 points 2 days ago

that's a great language to learn!!!

[-] JayJLeas@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I enjoyed it. The teacher had lived in Japan for a while so we also got culture lessons, which was great.

[-] emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

India - local language, English and Hindi

(Language is a controversial issue in India, and the present situation is more a political compromise than what's most useful, with many rules and exceptions, and some states / schools simply ignoring the whole compromise altogether.)

[-] RoquetteQueen@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

I'm Canadian, so French. I did it for six years and I learned more than I thought, but I still don't really speak French.

[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

In australia it was french in primary and high school.

[-] ghost_towels@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

West coast of Canada and in my daughters high school they have French, Spanish, and Hul’q’umi’num, which is the local First Nations language. Which I think is pretty freaking cool. Shes taking French though, since as she says, we are a bilingual country.

I lived overseas growing up so my choices were french, Spanish, and Arabic. I could have been fluent in Arabic! But nooooo, I took spanish. Think I speak spanish at all?

[-] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

USA, too—Spanish and French.

If we’d had a third language it probably would have been Chinese instead of German—the cultural influence of German was minimal in the part of California where I grew up.

[-] manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

I'm in australia, and moved around a bit while i was young, I had lessons

in primary schools in:

english, german, japanese, indonesian, sign language, japanese again

in high schools:

english, japanese, french, german, and french again

[-] FUCKING_CUNO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

US; ASL, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese (which appears to have been replaced with Korean)

I took two years of German, and one each of French and Spanish. I knew that without someone to practice with, I was going to forget the advanced stuff anyway, so opted for basic familiarity of three.

[-] bipolarbxtch123@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

USA here. It was Spanish, French or German, too. I took Spanish for extra credit. It was an easy A as I grew up speaking it.

[-] Nemo@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

US, English and Spanish. But we had the option, schedule permitting, to go to one of the other highschools in town to take Latin, German, French, or ASL. One friend took ASL, the rest of us took Spanish. I still speak it every day.

[-] monovergent@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

My schools in the US:

Only English for all of elementary school. Starting in middle school, students can choose to take Spanish, French, Latin or German (in descending order of popularity). A bus would take you to one particular high school in the county for Mandarin, Greek, Russian, Japanese, etc. For the advanced diploma, you needed to take 3 years of a foreign language course. The full sequence offered for Spanish, French, Latin, and German takes 6 years.

this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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