What are the most popular foreign languages in Japan?
 

Besides the mandatory English,

What would be the list of foreign languages taught in schools by their popularity?

A survey from 2007 says:

Masaegu, do you know what the age group of the survey is? Do you have any details on it?

I was actually surprised to see that 26% apparently don't have any interest in learning another language.

Actually, I'm surprised to see that 74% are interested!

In America;
* More than 200 million children in China are studying English, a compulsory subject for all Chinese primary school students. By comparison, only about 24,000 of approximately 54 million elementary and secondary school children in the United States are studying Chinese.

* According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, only 31% of American elementary schools (and 24% of public elementary schools) report teaching foreign languages.
79% of those schools focus on giving introductory exposure to a language rather than achieving overall proficiency.
* Only 44% of American high school students are enrolled in foreign language classes as reported by the 2002 Digest of Education Statistics. Of those students, 69% are enrolled in Spanish and 18% in French.
Less than 1% of American high school students combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu.
* Less than 8% of United States undergraduates take foreign language courses, and less than 2% study abroad in any given year. Foreign language degrees account for only 1% of undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States.

10,504 people; Teens thru over-50.

If you find that graph surprising, Graph # 3 in the link will give you a heartattack.

http://www.myvoice.co.jp/biz/surveys/10211/index.html

I am sure today there are more than 24,000 students in America studying Chinese. It is quite the fad now.

it's the sink-or-swim of the future imo

Do you really think Americans need to learn Chinese to remain a world power? I think that is the least of our problems.

A world power is more like soaring through the sky in the sink or swim analogy.

I'm not sure that America will have the ability to remain a world power, yeah top 10 for sure but not quite the way it has been in the last 50 years. It just feels inevitable to me, like it's time in the spotlight has passed. That's just a feeling though, no facts or proof to back it up.

But yeah I do think that learning Chinese will help America hold it's position a lot longer.

Actually, I don't find that hard to believe at all, considering that only 2% are １０代. I'm sure that some of the 20代 are in college, but only some... and I'm not sure if all of them are studying a foreign language. 10代 + 20代＝21%. People studying a foreign language = more than 24%. That's not too bad. As StonerPenguin pointed out, Americans aren't all that inclined to learn a foreign language.... in my experience only 2 years of high school were necessary! Other than that, nothing. At any rate, that would have been a much more interesting survey had they split the results by age group. Thanks for the statistics though, they're always interesting to look at.