As a Japanese native, the only foreign language I studied at school was basically English.

However, as part of my ancient Japanese language education, I studied classical Chinese literature written in Chinese characters, from which hiragana and other Japanese characters are derived, so ancient Chinese might also be included in the list of foreign languages ​​I learned.

English of course, the language of the invaders

I did grammar school, so we had:

• Dutch (our native language)
• English
• French
• German
• Classical Greek
• Latin
• Chinese (optional course)

Dutch and English were all through school, the other ones you took for 2 years and then picked two languages to follow through on, one of which had to be Greek or Latin. I did German and Greek.

My middle school had English, German, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek.

French, Spanish, and Latin.

Does English count in the USA? 😆

In my US public school: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Latin

Edit: just checked their website to see what they do now, AP level French Spanish, Italian. And apparently have an ASL class. No more Russian

In my part of Australia we had to learn Japanese between the ages of 10 and 14, after that is became optional.

Spanish is most common, but many high schools also teach French, Latin, and German.

Fun times when my German teacher had the idea of showing up to the French class cookout uninvited (there were only 6 of us, cf. 12 students in French)

ASL, Greek, Italian, Russian, and Japanese were only offered at specific schools in my district, with a bus that takes you to those classes and back. Japanese ended up being just a TV broadcast alongside worksheets and was eventually dropped from the catalog. Friends and family living in larger cities and suburbs told me about taking Mandarin Chinese, but the school district I attended (and neighboring districts) didn't offer it.

edit: this is in the US

Mine didn't even have French all the way through - you had to do it by correspondence or go the the local French immersion school. Which is barely constitutional in Canada.

We had to choose 2 of English, German, Spanish, French, Italian. We had the option of Japanese as extracurricular

Spanish, French, German, Latin, and if you wanted to learn Italian, you could go to the sister school in the morning for that class and then come back by bus.

Mandatory:

• Danish (Native)
• English
• German
• Other Nordic languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic (as part of Danish class)

Optional:

• French
• Spanish
• Latin (mandatory on certain schools)

In US, had French and Latin, plus of course English.

I think mine only had French or Italian. I'm Canadian.

In my hometown, it was Spanish, Latin, German, French, or ASL (I know, I know, not a foreign language. Arguably Spanish isn't either, but anyway).

But each school only had one, so you only got fo choose if you had enough free periods to drive across town three times a week.

My school had Spanish. I learned Latin once I was in college.

I only remember French, Spanish, or German (this was back in the 90s). My kids have all those plus Japanese, Mandarin, and ASL to choose from

Australia, we were offered French, Indonesian (and perhaps german?) in the two schools i went to.

US.

Spanish, French, and Latin as an independent study. It was a Catholic high school. At least one of the public schools in the area had German and another had Russian.

In my German “Gymnasium“, we had English, French, Latin and Russian.

As a German:

• English mandatory from the beginning
• Mandatory choice between Latin and French in 6th grade, Latin possible until 10th/11th grade (EF) and French possible until graduation
• Russian and Spanish possible from EF until graduation
• Korean and Japanese offered as extracurricular activities (Korean was taught by the parent of a student and stopped when said student graduated, Japanese was offered by a teacher who was a weeb so we mostly just watched anime (I think the only thing we actually learned was how to introduce ourselves), but it only started being offered 6 months before Covid shut everything down, don’t know if she continued offering it afterwards)

In America it's French, German and Spanish and in Panama it's English and French.

In addition to English, my high school offered courses in French, German, Spanish and Latin. Depending on the diploma track you were on, these were not available to you, optional or mandatory. The college prep kids had to take two semesters of language, the "tech prep" students could count a language as an art elective, and it was a tall order for the prison prep kids to pass English class.

I took two semesters of French, enough to where I think I could get the hell back out of Quebec if I needed to.

English, Spanish, German, French, and eventually Japanese.

US

It varies from district to district of course

My school offered Spanish, French, and Latin

They used to offer German, but ended that a few years before I got there.

In 7th grade, unless you're in remedial English, they have you do ¼ of the year taking each as an "exploratory" language (the last quarter they had something else, I want to say they called it "study skills" or something, just a very general class on how to do school stuff)

Then in 8th grade you took that class, it's been a long time but I think you had it for half the year, but it possibly might have been for just a quarter or maybe for the whole year.

Then in 9th-12th grade you had each class for half the year. If you really wanted to you might have been able to arrange your schedule to have, for example, French 2 1st semester and 3 2nd, but again, it's been a while, I don't remember exactly how the scheduling worked.

Little tangential story about my own language learning

I went with French

Initially I kind of wanted to do Latin, but the Latin teacher was a little bit insane. Not actually a bad teacher, but I just didn't jive with her energy, she was a former gymnast from Russia, and also kind of a germophobe, and just really intense and hyper, one of those rare human beings that if you saw a character like her in a work of fiction it might break your immersion for being unrealistic, but there she was, in the flesh.

There were two Spanish teachers, one was fine, the other was arrested a few years later for being a child molester (I heard somewhere that it eventually turned out that the kids who accused him made it up, but I really can't find anything from after his arrest to confirm that one way or another) and I didn't get particularly good vibes from him regardless.

So I went with French. The French teacher was actually pretty great. Also, I decided that I'd rather go to France for a school trip if I stick with it over Spain or Italy (for Latin class)

Unfortunately, she also had a baby that year and was out for most of the year.

We had a long term substitute who was also pretty great, and a pretty competent French teacher.

However, that substitute had some kind of health thing come up and was also out most of the time.

So we had a string of short-term substitutes who mostly didn't speak a word of French.

And so we all pretty much just got passed along to French 2 knowing barely any more French than we did after our one quarter of exploratory French the year before.

That year, the high school got a new French teacher. He wasn't so much a French teacher as much as he was a teacher who happened to be from France. He didn't seem to me to be particularly good at teaching a language. He was also kind of a sad, lonely man who was too soft to deal with American teenagers, and some of the most unruly and problematic our school had to offer were in his first semester class, and they absolutely broke this poor man's soul, he was an empty husk of a man by the time we got him 2nd semester, and although my class was decent in comparison, teenagers can smell weakness in a teacher and he was totally unable to control the class, he ended up having to take a lot of time off, I'm pretty sure because of depression, and actually got canned a couple weeks before the end of the school year.

So again, we all kind of get shuffled along to French 3 despite having only the most basic understanding of French possible.

The higher-level French teacher had been there for a long time. She is good at her job. She's intense, but not unlikeable. Unfortunately from French 3 onwards, the class is supposed to be mostly taught in French and most of us could barely manage to ask to go to the bathroom. So she was frustrated with us, we were confused by her, it wasn't a great experience.

So after barely scraping by in that class I decided no more French class for me.

Which was kind of a bummer, because I was kind of looking forward to going on the class trip to France in French 4 or 5 (they did the trip every other year) but I was way out of my depth and didn't want to put in the effort to catch up on my own.

German as the native tongue. English for everybody from year five. Either French or Latin mandatory from year seven. Optionally Latin or French (whichever you did not take in year seven) from year nine, and then another one from year eleven, also optional, might be Spanish, Italian, whatever.

Nowadays, some of those language courses finish with international language proficiency certificates, so you can attend foreign universities right after school. My daughter got her Cambridge C2 there.

(US)

Middle school: Latin High school: German

Irish and French. Irish was mandatory, French technically wasn't but most (all?) universities required (require?) a passing grade in at least one foreign language regardless of the course. Anecdotally in Ireland most schools offered French or German as a foreign language.

Granted this was all many years ago so the system may have changed since.

They taught Welsh, French, and German when I was at school but they swapped German for Spanish a few years after I finished.

As a person from pacific, we could choose between Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and the local austronesian language, in addition to mandatory english, for high school.

Pacific economy relies a lot on tourism, and it mainly comes from Asia or America, so knowing how to talk to tourists can be handy.

We had Spanish, French, German, American Sign Language, and Mandarin

UK here. English, obviously. That's it. Modern languages - either French or Spanish - were optional. It's honestly embarrassing.

Hungary had Russian all the way up to around 1993 as mandatory language classes in elementary grade 5-8 and high school grades 9-12. Starting about 1989 though a lot of schools got the option to replace it with either German or English. Due to the proximity of Austria and Germany, a lot of students opted for German back then. This trend continued until the ubiquity of the Internet, when English gradually overtook German.

In Germany I had English starting grade five elementary during the late 80s.

My kids are having English as their language classes in Quebec.

French and Spanish only at my first high school (NJ), and French, Spanish, and German at my second high school (PA so the inclusion of German makes sense).