Asklemmy

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.