It's also not certain that the reforms will make the language any easier to learn for either French schoolchildren or foreign language learners.
Teaching and filmmaking have changed a lot in the last half-century, but it's still hard to persuade schoolchildren that foreign countries matter.
Under a 1990 law, all Spanish schoolchildren are now taught a foreign language (98% choose English) from the age of 8 and in some regions start at 6.
So the foreigners -- along with the local schoolchildren and their teachers -- find themselves pawns in a nightmare of ancient hatreds and rivalries, strange foreign creatures who cannot begin to comprehend this brutal, insular world.
The mailings, which went out this week, are also translated into Cantonese, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Russian, the dominant foreign languages among the city's 1.1 million schoolchildren.
There, I was thrown into challenges I'd never faced before: presenting to schoolchildren and teachers; producing our own foreign language documentary; teaching ICT, through language and communication barriers, to the deaf.
There is absolutely no reason why British schoolchildren should not be as competent in a foreign language as their French, German and Dutch counterparts.
In fact, even as they profess reluctance about drilling schoolchildren, adults who themselves are looking to learn something new — from foreign languages to bar-exam material — increasingly turn to apps that animate some version of a multiple-choice or flashcard narrative.
With striking illustrations by Noma Bar she has conceived an appealing, if not exactly easy, primer for foreign audiences learning Mandarin.Her method uses a technique already popular with Chinese schoolchildren to turn many of the basic characters on which the language is built into illustrations.
The health minister, Nkosazana Zuma, did commission an AIDS-awareness play to educate schoolchildren, but it turned out to be a hugely expensive fiasco from which foreign donors withdrew.
