Japanese most favored second foreign language

By Yun Suh-young

Most Korean high school students select Japanese and Chinese as their second foreign language in schools, a document released by the education ministry showed Wednesday.

About 62.5 percent of students at 1,561 high schools across the nation selected Japanese during the five years to 2010, followed by 26.7 percent choosing Chinese. Those who picked German came in at 4.9 percent. The percentage for French stood at 4.8, 0.9 percent for Spanish, and 0.2 percent for Russian.

Those who opted to learn Japanese and Chinese took up 90 percent of the students especially from 2009.

“I think students choose Japanese because they think it’s easy to learn,” said an employee of a popular Japanese language academy in southern Seoul.

“Since the demand is high, there are a lot of high school students attending language institutes to study even though they have Japanese classes in school.”

There were no students, however, who chose Arabic as their second foreign language for the simple reason that there are no Arabic classes set up in any of the high schools nationwide.

Those who choose Arabic as a test subject for the national college Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), however, are continually on the rise although no classes are available in schools. In fact, the number of students who chose Arabic as a test subject for the SAT in 2010 exceeded that of those who chose Japanese by 29,000.

“There are no teacher-training courses in colleges for Arabic language which is why there aren’t professional Arabic language teachers available. Also why would people apply for Arabic teaching positions in high schools if schools won’t hire them? The victims of this vicious cycle become the students,” said Min Woong-ki, operator of the website “egyptkorea.com,” a website that specializes in providing information about studying abroad in Arabic-speaking countries.

“Since there aren’t any Arabic classes available in high schools, students have to rely on private language institutes which only caters to the private education market,” said Min.