Yep - we all had to do French. After one year those in the upper stream also did Latin; the next group down also did German; the remainder did more French.
UK college courses are much narrower than in the US so unless you were doing language degree, or related, you would not study a language.
2 years of foreign language required, public American high school. I started with French as an elective in 7th grade and did it through 11th grade, but my level of fluency was a little better than the other students because my mom speaks pretty good French and German and made us learn it when we were little. Since I haven’t used it in 6 years (SAT II got me out of the requirement in college), it’s deteriorated a lot. I can still read it very well and understand OK, but conversational speech is bad.
I took French in jr high and high school, then a couple of semesters of Spanish in college to meet language requirements.
In my final undergrad year, I took one course in basic Russian to fill out my hours to graduate and, since I’d been to Russia when I knew only a handful of basic words, I thought it’d be useful to know more in case I ever went back.
The French has stuck better than the Spanish or Russian.
I studied in Quebec during all of my primary school, high school and cégep years. I had to take English classes starting in 4th grade (I believe it now starts in 1st grade) all through the end of high school, although I didn’t take any English class in my last year of high school, having already done it a year earlier. I could also have taken up to two years of Spanish in high school, but it wasn’t compulsory and I took computer science instead.
In cégep, I also had to take two English language classes as part of the requirements common to all programs, but since I had tested in the highest level of proficiency I could have replaced them with two foreign language classes, namely Spanish or German. I tried to do it, but I got bad advice from my advisor who said that since I had already taken an optional Spanish class in my first trimester, I would have had to take German instead. It was mostly Spanish that interested me so I ended up taking these two English literature classes. Maybe I should have taken the German classes; it is one language I would like to know.
I then went to the University of Ottawa, which doesn’t have a foreign language requirement AFAIK. So the answer is that I had to take English for most of my schooling, but I wasn’t required to take another language although there were plenty of opportunities to do so.
My high school did not exactly require foreign language courses to graduate, but if you were on the the college prep track, it was de facto required to take two years. My undergrad college required one year of a foreign language. My grad school used to require a foreign language, but it was eliminated several years before I entered.
I took four years of Spanish in high school (from a native Chilean, so I have an accent) which gave me a technical pass on my undergrad requirement.
The requirement in my high school wasn’t so much that we had to learn the language as it was we had to pass the regents exam. I took french because my sister took it, and the teacher liked me. He liked everyone and passed us with no proficiency. A couple years after I graduated it was reported in the local paper that his exams had been chosen for review and every single one was regraded or rejected.
As a result, when I went to college (a few years later) I was not able to test out of the language requirement. I thought I had no facility for language, but it turned out I really enjoyed learning spanish and ended up completing a minor in it.
Had I actually learned a language in high school I would not have needed to continue studying it, or another language in college.
Yup. German/Spanish, switched to English/German just before the final exam because bilingual means free points. I also took the Latin elective but lost all interest after two years, which is what happens when horrible, *horrible *teachers follow great teachers.
My school also offered Russian, Italian and ancient Greek.
Almost all the college programs I enlisted in had a mandatory if skeletal English component, but no other languages.
It was a bit ridiculous at my high school. I attended in very northern Maine, right on the border of very French New Brunswick Canada. Virtually everybody in my little town was brought up bi-lingual … so of course everyone took French for their foreign language and then went home to tell their parents, who didn’t speak English, that they got an A.
Not me. First of all, I wasn’t bi-lingual. I was born elsewhere and moved their young. There was no ubiquitous French in western New York. So I took Spanish for my foreign language. Me and about 5 other people from the whole school, from a teacher who could speak passing English, fluent French, and had to read from the book to even fake speaking Spanish.
I think everyone got an A in that class too because the teacher didn’t know if we were butchering the language one way or another.
I kinda sorta had to take a foreign language in high school. It wasn’t a graduation requirement, but it was a requirement for the college prep curriculum I was on.
I took two years of Spanish and a year of French, which turned out to be the last requirement I needed to fulfill for the Presidential Academic Fitness Award, too.
In college I took 6 classes of Spanish, just because it was an elective I liked, but I don’t think there was a foreign language requirement.
In elementary school I had elementary Spanish - mostly names of animals and stuff. Then in junior high (7th & 8th grades) I had two years of more rigorous Spanish with actual grammar. In high school we were required to take two years of a foreign language for graduation and the University of California system required 4 years (in high school) for entrance.
So I took German and Russian in high school and ended up with the equivalent of 8 years of high school foreign language. I took French in college but I might as well have saved myself the trouble - I’m terrible in French.
I had to take 2 yrs foreign language (Spanish) because that was required for “college prep” students in high school. I took another year in college to meet my “multicultural” requirement.
I had to take two years of a foreign language in HS (I took 2 each of Latin and French) and in college only one year was required–but it had to a third year course, so I took three years of German. I guess you could place out of it. This was all in the 1950s, could be very different today.
We had French, Spanish and Latin. You had to take two years of foreign language, but I think you could skip one year of Latin if you took Etymology first.
I took three years of French. I remember nothing except when I’m trying to learn Spanish. This only adds to my confusion.
You didn’t have to take a language in high school, but your counselors gave you funny looks and tried to talk you into taking them, because it was well known that colleges liked to see four years of a foreign language. I did take four years of Spanish in high school, and everyone who was obviously college bound took four years of a language too. Class of '06.
You didn’t have to take them in college, either. That’s very strange for a hippie liberal arts school, and it’s the direct result of a revolt from the Language departments’ professors; they hate teaching eighteen sections of French 101 every year to students who don’t want to be there. They’d rather offer just enough for the people who want to be there, and let the others be ignorant. Class of '10.
Very much a requirement, in high school and college (both of which were in Georgia - this may be the one thing I’ve ever heard of where Georgia beats California in something to do with education).
My suburban Atlanta high school offered French, German, Spanish and Latin - I took the last two. Then, at the University of Georgia, I took more Latin and Biblical Hebrew.
Wish I still had the Hebrew - I got to really liking the phonetics and the flow of the language, and it was neat to be able to say that I had read at least part of the Bible in the original. I was one of only two goyim in the class. My prof was a cool guy, too - he was an expert in ancient Middle Eastern languages - Ugaritic, Akkaddian, Canaanite, Sumerian. Neat stuff.
Whether I had to take one in high school, I cannot remember. I did take German, but not sure now if a foreign language was actually required. But I do remember intentionally shunning Spanish, as I feared it might for some reason help make me be stuck in Texas.
It was required at university, and I took German.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention I took courses in Greek and Basque my senior year at Georgetown. Still got the books. Oh, and Old English sophomore year. Fun times.
I attended French classes regularly in middle school, though I don’t recall actually learning any French. The teacher gave me the minimal passing grade, and that was an act of kindness on her part.
I decided that I sucked at languages altogether and figured I was destined to be monolingual.
Then I met a very nice lady from Rio de Janeiro…
With the proper motivation, it was a snap to attain fluency in Portuguese. And this same fluency allowed me to test out of college-level Spanish (CLEP) and college-level Portuguese (NYU).
I felt guilty about the Spanish CLEP test because a Portuguese speaker could pass it with little effort due to the similarities in the language, while still not being able to speak Spanish fluently.
It was required in high school. I took German.
In college I started out working on a BA degree and two years of foreign language was required. I took Spanish and made it through a year of it before I really started having trouble with it. I switched to a BS program, which required only a year of foreign language (but some extra math classes instead), to avoid taking any more.
In addition to a foreign language requirement in high school (2 years Spanish, 1 year French) I was required to take French (as were all students) each year in middle school, as well. (Private school.)