Which foreign languages (apart from English) are most popular in your country? (schools, college)
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In the USA
1. Spanish...everyone takes it here, you go to California, Florida and Texas and that's all that is spoken
2. Chinese,I'm surprised no one has said this yet but now in days many students take Chinese, I actually know several schools that cancelled french and replaced it with Chinese
3. French...It slowly declining since the 1950s but its still popular
In the USA
1. Spanish...everyone takes it here, you go to California, Florida and Texas and that's all that is spoken
2. Chinese,I'm surprised no one has said this yet but now in days many students take Chinese, I actually know several schools that cancelled french and replaced it with Chinese
3. French...It slowly declining since the 1950s but its still popular
Chinese? Maybe in your particular area but in general it is Spanish, then French, then a plethora of all languages taken by single digit percentages of students. Chinese is definetly nowhere near #2. Chinese is taken by a whopping 3%, behind Italian, Japanese, and German. Also, French has not declined and has actually slightly increased in popularity over the last decade.
In Taiwan-judging by the popularity of languages taught in my college,and the private-owned language teaching programs out there.
1.Japanese.Japan is nearby and people love Japan in general.The rest of the languages are not even close to the popularity of Japanese.
2.German.Academically,German is always a powerful language.German is mainly taught in universities,it's not very popular outside the campus though.
3.Korean.It got popular fairly recently because of all the Korean dramas and Korean pop musics
4.French or Spanish
The rest are all very unpopular.
Actually learning a second foreign language is kinda pointless in Taiwan because most people don't even speak proper English.
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In the USA, I would say Spanish and then Chinese in many parts of the country. But in large cities like NYC, one also hears many languages. In my area, Russian is the dominant second language (and after that Spanish, Hebrew and then Chinese).
In Israel, Arabic is the second national language besides Hebrew. Also Russian is very common. Many years ago, signs were also in French but everything has been converted to English.
In Korea, besides English the next popular would be Mandarin and Japanese.
People try to learn French and German but hardly any succeed in mastering it. Too foreign and scarcely used in the Far East.
German and French have a special status above all other foreign languages (apart from English, obviously). This becomes clear if you look at the data of the number of students participating in the Central Exam 2013 for all the foreign languages:
To be clear: VWO is the highest level of secondary education, VMBO BB is the lowest. The central exam is a single exam (of about 3 hours) taken by all students at the end of the final year and is worth as much as the average result of all the exams of the previous 2/3 years combined. A student can only sit for the CE in a subject if has taken exams in that subject in the previous years as well (otherwise it's not possible to calculate the final result). So the data above does not represent all the students that have studied a certain language in secondary school, only the ones who studied it from beginning to end. Depending on the level of education or the kind of profile the student choose (e.g. science/mechanics), students will sometimes have to drop certain languages as they enter the second phase of secondary school.
English is a mandatory subject for all students at all levels, that is why the number of students taking the English CE is so high compared to other languages.
in the Netherlands:
1.German
2.Arabic
3.Turkish
4.French
5.Polish
6-10 (not in order):
Papiamento
Portuguese
Spanish
Indonesian
Mandarin
11-13 (not in order):
Italian
Serbian
Russian
Those are the most spoken languages, not sure if they are the most studied.
I think Turkish is spoken more than Arabic, and French far exceeds both. Virtually nobody speaks Turkish or Arabic outside of the Turkish and Moroccan immigrant communities, and even within those communities the younger generation often barely speaks the language. On the other hand, millions of native Dutch people have studied French in high school and travel to France on a regular basis. According to the latest Eurobarometer survey, 29% of Dutch people speak French on a conversational level. Do you really think one in three people in the Netherlands are able to have a conversation in Turkish or Arabic? Maybe in a place like Amsterdam or Rotterdam (even there it would be a stretch) but certainly not in the rest of the country. I would estimate the number of conversational Turkish speakers at around 5% and Arabic even less.
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