On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 07:23:11PM -0800, Patrick Andries wrote:
>
> However, the questions -- as I see them -- are : should they all speak
> only English as a foreign language, why do they learn only one foreign
> language (just next to them there are 100 millions native German
> speakers...) and could they not automatically switch to English when a
> foreigner is perceived (and imagine for a brief moment that the person may
> actually speak their own language, a Belgian in the Netherlands, a Finn in
> Sweden) ?
In Denmark, where I live, people generally learn more than one foreign language in
school. I had 3 foreign languages (en, de, fr) , and I attended high school
as as math-phys student. The language students in high school have more
languages than that. High school attandants (aged 16-19) today may have
a number of languages to pick from, including en, de, fr, ru, es, and Latin.
Usually people having attended Danish high school have had 3 foreign languages.
Whether they then can speak it is another question.
keld
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