I was going to post this in another thread but I didn't want to derail it so it gets its own thread.....

i believe that all schools have to learn an asian lanuage as part of the new national framework, so id be going with mandarin
This really bugs me. Every school should teach a language; what language they choose is irrelevant. If we turn out a generation of students with no European or Middle Eastern languages we are doing ourselves a huge disservice. Spanish is the most widely spoken language on earth so if a school wants to teach it then it should be able to do so. Lots of schools can't afford multiple languages so they will have to drop languages that they teach well to teach an Asian language and possibly teach it to a lower standard.