re: Alphabet. Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, Urdu…
Hindi is an I-E language, btw.
The Houston Independent School District offers Spanish, German, Italian, French, Hebrew, Russian, Latin, Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese & Hindi. Plus English, of course. All schools do not offer all languages.
We need to increase options rather than reduce them–and begin teaching languages younger. I have many international co-workers & am appalled at American language ignorance. My measly two years of Latin aided my English vocabulary–& really helped when I got serious about Spanish. And an abortive college attempt at German wasn’t wasted.
Our local high school does teach Japanese; it’s pretty popular. My sister took 4 years. I think there’s Russian, too. And I knew a guy who went to school in Berkeley and took Swahili.
While we can argue a lot about the usefulness of any particular language, I do tend to agree that it’s not so much which language you study as that you do it at all. I’ve never found any use for my high-school Spanish, that bit of college German has been more useful, and while I don’t remember more than 4 words of all that Russian I took in college, the grammar I learned there comes in handy all the time; I’ve been able to transfer a lot of it to other things. Also I can read Russian phonetically, which is fun. The fluent Danish isn’t all that useful, except in deciphering German.
Learning another language is also learning another culture… Whether you decide to learn it for fun or business reasons, learning a foreign language will enrich you in more than just one way!
I speak 5 different languages (3 fluently) including ASL (American Sign Language) that I learned out of love for my deaf girlfriend at the time.
I would love to learn more, especially since I love traveling the world… too little time and so much to do ahah!
Northern Californian here…
Public high schools here teach Spanish (most popular), Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Italian, and Russian. I know of at least one high school that also teaches Latin and Hebrew. At the college level, include the above along with some introductory classes teaching Cantonese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
An insightful observation. Living in the US, I grew up with the assumption that only immigrants spoke two languages. It wasn’t until college that my professors and relatives hammered into me the following things:
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Most educated Americans spoke more than one language,
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Until recently (before the two World Wars?), the lingua franca in many nations was French (my parents and most people I know over the age of 50 remembers speaking it), and
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My West Coast bias makes me ignorant of the fact that people in the East Coast regularly travel to Europe, so young people acclimate to multi-lingual environments and can pick up a language or two simply through immersion.
Not a total hijack, but I do remember 6 years of High School and College French. I enjoyed it, did pretty well, and at the end of my French classes, could probably have done fairly well in France.
What really locked me into “fluency” in French was taking 3 semesters of Arabic. I loved Arabic, liked the new alphabet (to me), and loved the glimpses of the pan-Arab culture I was getting from my Syrian and Egyptian teachers.
Our last semester was an “all-Arabic” class. the intent was to simulate an immersion class, so we only spoke Arabic from the moment we entered the classroom. As I struggled to make myself “think in Arabic”, I found myself lagging most when replying to direct questions from my professor.
The funny thing? When I would stumble on my answer, I woudl always answer in French, instead of my native English. Very weird.
-Cem
I took an immersion class in Greek and within a week or so I started to have trouble coming up with simple words in English. The most memorable one was when I answered the phone at home and couldn’t come up with any word at all, not Greek, not English, not nuffin!
I think it’s a good thing that ASL (American Sign Language) is recognized as a language and allowed for language credit at most of the schools I know of.
What language you “should” learn in public school depends on your personal situation. A history lover will want something different from a linguist or a traveler. Mandarin would be useless for me. I wish I’d learned Gaelic as a kid. It would be great to know Crow or Lakota living around here.
Learning one language that’s different from your mother tongue helps you in understanding others. I studied French in middle school. It’s been marginally useful (I used a bit of it in France, Switzerland, and Quebec), but not much. On the other hand, when I traveled to Mexico, which I do quite a bit, I found that a background in both French and English made it much easier to understand written Spanish. I probably had 20-30% comprehension of Mexican newspapers before I made any attempt to learn the language.
I guess what I’m saying is that the act of learning another language matters a lot more than which specific language you learn.
One never knows what language would be particularly useful. I studied French in high school, and I don’t regret it – it has been helpful on occasion in my travels. But the company I work for has extensive business ties to Europe, particularly Germany, and I’ve had to make lots of business trips there. So the one language I wish I had learned is German. Hardly an irrelevant language.
Ed
[halo] Isn’t Germany the largest country in Europe-minus-Russia? [/halo] Well, d’uh. My brother’s many (rotating) Easter-European subordinates in Spain often use Russian as a lingua franca; the youngest ones have replaced it with English.
The one thing I regret about having gone to the Jesuits rather than the public High School is that I didn’t have the chance to study a third foreign language (fourth if you count Latin as a foreign language). Problem is, it would have meant less Draftsmanship and Art, two subjects I loved. The options for my school were English or French; at the public one the options for third language were English, French, Italian and German. We used to make fun of the people taking Italian - “c’mon, are you sure it counts?”
Now the private school where I did K-8 is starting to offer Chinese as an extracurricular; they’re looking for a teacher in Arabic. But while many of our Chinese immigrants have at least a high school education and often more, it’s not the case with the Arabs 
I may have had a hand in convincing a certain company to start offering their current flagship program in Spanish. During an interview with them, I mentioned I found it funny that they had it in German, given that it’s not such a big language; French makes sense since it’s big, but I would have chosen Spanish rather than German based on market size. They pointed out that Spain is much smaller than Germany; I deadpanned “ah yes, I forgot nobody from Quebec plays in the frFR servers. Oh, and you don’t have any customers from Latin America, that’s right.”
I can see you have read Sartre, Camus, Hesse, and, especially, Grass. Pretentious drivel! Utter Crap!
Or were you being facetious?
(Yeah, I know you were. I wasn’t.)
I loves me some Sartre and Camus. Shame I can’t read them in the original any more. My German was never good enough for Hesse or Grass, though.
It should be remembered that French is spoken in many places, including parts of Africa and the Caribbean, as well as France itself and Quebec. It isn’t just for going to Paris.
Dutch?
Look, there is exactly one guy in the entire Netherlands who doesn’t speak English. His name is Jan Smit and lives in Flevoland. It is theorized that Jan must suffer from some strange learning disability.