My country has two that are compulsory. Used to anyway. I don't know if English is still compulsory. These languages are taught in all primary (7-12 years old) and secondary schools (13-17 years old).In post 198, tictac wrote:in principle, we learn 3 in standard schooling.
in practice i retain pmuch none of my swedish and it was never fluent.
awkward timing 4 a rep-out.
looks like gonna be a no-kill night.
The national schools don't make any extra languages compulsory but are constitutionally required to provide teachers to them if a certain number of students' parents request for them if I remember what I read straight from my country's constitution correctly. I don't think it ever happens in practice because there are the "vernacular schools" as they are called in Wikipedia, which teach the compulsory plus a vernacular language. At my part of the country, the two vernacular schools I've seen are Tamil and Chinese. The Chinese one teaches Mandarin Chinese. The Tamil one teaches Tamil as far as I know.
I attended a Chinese vernacular school. Students were not allowed to use any other variety of Chinese in school (like Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, etc.), which I knew none of in my first few years in primary school. At some point in primary school, I picked up Hokkien Chinese from my aunt after hearing one of my parents saying no one in my generation of the family knows or uses it, probably to make myself feel special.
