Countries with the Best Foreign Language Education

[zenmonkey]

Public libraries in the US vary hugely - The one I use (somewhere in Northern CA, and no, I won't tell what town) - sells off its surplus which includes hundreds of books in foreign languages - I've posted some my finds in my log before. It's quite well endowed in Language material (for example 60 books for learning Portuguese, at least a thousand books in French...). Heck, they even have 1 movie in Ladakhi.

Add to that interlibrary loans and I'm pretty sure that a lot of states are doing well enough in this material.

Today, here in Germany, I went to the OXFAM used bookstore and bought 5 bilingual readers (and a half dozen German/English books I've wanted) for less than 20 €.

I agree that overall, often it is difficult to find relevant material but a persistent hunter will quickly fill their own reserve to the point beyond what they can reasonably need or use.

Have we determined which countries have the best Foreign Language Education?

[Cavesa]

Have we determined which countries have the best Foreign Language Education?

It looks like Luxembourg is the winner for now!

And I'd be curious about India, and some other multilingual countries outside Europe. I'd say some of them could be candidates for winning too.

[jeff_lindqvist]

My apologies, I shouldn't have generalized. It was a note based on my experience with a mix of czech and french libraries of the municipal type (not specialized in languages, not university libraries).

For what it's worth, the university next door doesn't specialize in languages - most language-related programs disappeared ten years ago, and even back then, it was only English and Russian. So, only a tiny minority of the collection has ever had any connection to the university.

As I wrote somewhere else - If you want to study languages, you're in the wrong part of the country. (Or at least at the wrong university.)