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Language education in your country


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In Finland everyone starts to learn English in third grade (age 9). Swedish begins at fifth grade or seventh grade (age 11 or 13) depending on your choosing. Those two are compulsory throughout the school system (primary & secondary). Then you can pick extra languages depending on what the school has to offer. Most popular are German and Spanish but other ones are taught as well.

 

Every student has a right by law to study his or hers first language. So now that there are lots of immigrants more "exotic" languages are taught as well.

 

Finns tend to be rather good at English but they can be shy to speak it. :P *generalising*

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Maybe you can think about learning Chinese. :D

In China,teachers teach students Chniese and English.If you go to languages school(middle school),you can learn English,French,Russian,Japanese,Korean,Spanish and German.Some colleges offer more than 20 languages.

 

Chinese seems too hard to learn. It just looks like a bunch of symbols when I look at Chinese writing lol.

 

 

In Finland everyone starts to learn English in third grade (age 9). Swedish begins at fifth grade or seventh grade (age 11 or 13) depending on your choosing. Those two are compulsory throughout the school system (primary & secondary). Then you can pick extra languages depending on what the school has to offer. Most popular are German and Spanish but other ones are taught as well.

 

Every student has a right by law to study his or hers first language. So now that there are lots of immigrants more "exotic" languages are taught as well.

 

Finns tend to be rather good at English but they can be shy to speak it. :P *generalising*

 

So, say someone wants to learn Swedish first. Do they have to learn English first, or do they have the option to learn Swedish first if they so choose?

 

Also, you speak of "exotic" languages. What do these "exotic" languages consist of?

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  • 1 month later...

Well I live in Croatia. When you start primary school (around 6-7 years old) you learn english. In higher grades of primary school you start with German (so its now english+german). In high school you continue with those two and add Latin (and if you go to classical grammar school like me and ancient Greek too :D ). So english+german+latin+ancient greek.

 

But most high school offer additional foreign language like Spanish, Italian, French, Russian if you like :D

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I know we have many different nationalities on these forums, and I would like to ask you something about language education in your country. What languages are taught at school? Are people overall good at English?

 

Foreigners often say that Dutch people are very good at languages. It is true most of us speak English quite well, if I may say so. In secondary education, Dutch, English, French, German and sometimes Spanish are taught. In grammar school, from which I recently graduated, one also follows Latin and Ancient Greek (I did the latter).

 

So how is this in your country? Are foreign languages taught and spoken well?

When I saw this topic,i know that i HAVE to come in. :rolleyes:

 

I agree with you.When I transferred my flight in Amsterdam,I felt no obstacle to communicate with Dutch people in english,and i believe that they can understand me well.Really no offence I mean,things became quite opposite in France and Spain.Problems always occurred when I wanted to buy something.I can just speak few French words like bonjour,merci or oui.I thought the Europeans were all fairly good at english.But it turned out to be a misjudgment.

 

In Shanghai,we learn English as the first foreign language.But the problem is that,we lack oral practice,because the education and examination system forces students to concentrate more on the written part.

Besides,we cant compare the english teaching models in different countries for we have different first language.It is said that people who are native German speakers(sorry if im mistaken.im not 100% sure of it)tend to learn english more easily.but i have to claim that,people in shanghai speak Shanghainese whose pronounciation is a mixture of chinese and english.And i regard it as my first language.

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