Top 10 Languages That Should Be Taught In School

The Top Ten
1 Japanese

Japanese is a fun language, and you can find a lot of great textbooks on it. (Possibly due to how infamously hard it is (though, it's not extremely difficult, actually), and how now each textbook can claim to be the "one textbook that does it right"). It has a lot of patterns, and that's one of the things children are great with.

Japanese is very different from English. Since most schools only focus on Romance languages, which are similar, Japanese would be a way to show how languages can be very different. Japanese is also seen a lot in media, so it would be good to learn to understand it when it is in media.

I think japanese should be taught in school so they can learn how to speak, write, read, and get to know about the Japanese culture I think that will be a great opportunity for the student to get know about Japanese and how say things in Japanese.

Very cool language. I could see people who watch lots of anime BEGGING for this to happen.

2 American Sign Language (ASL)

Even though sign Language is considered a "language" it should still be taught in school. There're many people in the world that are deaf, and can't talk to many people, because they should know some sign language. Also, who knows, maybe you'll have a new neighbor, or classmate who could be deaf, so you can 'talk' with them.

I have never met a single deaf person in my life, and this already nearly useless language would be totally useless if you meet a deaf person outside the US, as they probably use a different sign language.

The easiest way to practice sign language is to look at your self in a large mirror and do the sign trust me I've done it before and it helped me a lot.

I would really love to speak Japanese fluently,but sign language is definitely more useful,and being able to communicate with a deaf person will definitely be very heart warming to them

3 German

German is a widely spoken language along with French and Spanish (which are the only languages taught at my school) and should be taught.

German is like an alien language -
Places- Stuttgart, Doorgstaat.
Names-Bastian Sweinsteiger, Arnold Schwarzenegger (I know he's Austrian but they speak German)
It is AWESOME.

The language of science and math...

I learn german at my school.

4 Chinese

Easily one of the hardest languages to learn that I was luckily exposed to at a very early age. I can't imagine the work it takes to be fluent when you aren't given the environment I was.

Pretty fascinating language, and have some very interesting words.

Mandarin is commonly taught in schools

5 Arabic

When I did a project on Saudi Arabia, we put in a video of basic words. There was something about it that made it sound very interesting and cool.

6 Russian

This language is very good. Pronunciation is much easier than English. Words sound how they look. No exceptions

This is a cool language. From pronunciation to writing...

Just because it's Russian.

I'd love to learn Russian!

7 Greek

Greek language must be taught in every school especially ancient greek because the most words are greek.

Greek would be a very interesting thing to learn, especially to Greek mythology fans.

I'm Greek and I'll tell you its really hard to learn

8 Norwegian

Norwegian is such a beautiful language. People need to learn it.

9 Italian

It's a really beautiful language that lends itself well to studying, and there is great italian literature, art and music too.
My perspective is that most kids are not going to learn to speak well enough in schools to matter internationally anyway. If you could open up the world of italian culture to them and they enjoyed it then that's probably more benefit than international preparation. Plus italian learners can bridge over to spanish very easily later on in their adulthood.

It's not an international language, only spoken in Italy and based on dead latin.

I would love to learn this. My dream is to travel to Italy one day.

Io parlo Italiano, and think it should be more prominent in schools.

10 French

Official language in 29 countries, spoken in 57 countries; in 2050 French will be spoken by more than 1.1 billion people ( from U.N.). Today, It's the 4th linguistic space in the world behind English, Chinese, Hindi but before Spanish; Arabic and Portuguese.

It can be an intelectual enrichment and it's very useful in a lot of economic domains (culture, art, aeronautic, industry, agriculture, science/high tech, diplomacy...). French is spoken on every continent by a lot of people and it's the most influencial language after English.

The Contenders
11 Dutch

Dutch is historically seen such a wonderful country, love it!

12 Irish

Dying languages in general should be taught in some schools.

13 Latin

It should be considered very important, because the roots of sciences, mainly chemistry and biology, are deep into Latin. For example, why is the element iron 'Fe' instead of 'I' or 'Ir'? Because it's Latin.
What about biology? Could explain such things as "Biology=Bio+Logos=Study of life". And I'm keeping the examples simple.

I agree, it should be taught in school! Luckily, my school teaches it, but some kids parents think the language isn't "useful" or "needed in life"! But, it even help you learn the roots of the English language!

I would've taken Latin in a heartbeat if I could have. It's still a very prominent language in the world of modern science.

Look to the future, Latin is dead

14 Portuguese
15 Danish
16 English
17 Bahasa Indonesia

ABSOLUTELY! Indonesian (it's the exact same language) is a very interesting language! It's quite useful too, since Indonesia currently has the tenth largest economy in the world. The number of native speakers is increasing, and it's really easy as well. No verb conjugations. No plural nouns. Latin alphabet. In short: Indonesian is awesome.

18 Catalan

In Spain this is of Important

19 Korean

We have a lot of trade with South Korea, e.g, Hyundai, LG, Samsung, and it would be useful to learn the language. Korea’s writing system, Hangul, Iis very basic, and easy to learn, and could be learnt in 1 & 1/2 hours, as it only as 24 letters. This gives the student more time to speak the language fluently. As Korea offers so much interesting culture, I believe it should be put into mainstream schooling.

Cool language and South Korea has a rising importance in technology and media. Shout out to K-pop and K-drama fans!

20 Polish
21 Proto-Indo-European
22 Finnish
23 Icelandic
24 Spanish

This may not apply to other countries but in the United States, we have a large Spanish Speaking population. Instead of forcing them to learn English, we should also learn to communicate with them in Spanish.

25 Serbian
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