French - the Best Choice for a Second Language

When my oldest daughter entered her freshman year of high school, it was finally time for her to sign up to learn a second language. I pushed and pushed and PUSHED for her to sign up for Spanish. Spanish, as far as I could tell, would be the most useful second language that she could learn. My husband pushed for her to sign up for Latin. Why Latin? Something about it being the language from which medical terms are derived. Personally, I think he wanted some sort of bragging rights about his daughter knowing how to speak and write Latin. Fortunately, she did not listen to either one of us. She wanted to learn French for the highly intellectual reason that it sounded romantic. Sigh. The joy of raising teenage girls. They are, if nothing else, utterly impractical. But what the heck - she was the one that had to do the work, and French as a second language was better than no second language at all.

So it turns out that she knew a little more about the world than my husband and I did. First of all, French is spoken in over 43 countries throughout the world. Did you know that? I did not know that. English is the most useful second language in the world - and French is the second! Who knew? French and English are the official working languages of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the International Labour Bureau, and the International Olympic Committee. French is one of the official languages of all postal services around the world, and the International Red Cross. French is also the most dominant working language at the European Court of Justice.

Unlike most languages, French is not limited to one or two continents. France is placed fourth in terms of world power, and it is renowned for the quality of its high technology. And there are French origins in over 20,000 of the words in the English language.