Sweet Briar College (Virginia, independent, women's college) cutting its German program.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. I traveled in Scandinavia last summer, and although I speak a bit of pidgin Norwegian,

I rarely had to use it, as opposed to when I went as a teenager.

In fact, when I was a teenager, I'd ask store clerks and the like, "Snakker du engelsk?" and about the time, the answer would be "Nej." But this time, I stopped asking, because people actually seemed offended that I thought they might not speak English.

Now everyone under the age of 50 or so speaks English and at least one other language. According to my relatives, they now start English in first grade.

When I was in Iceland, I ended up in one tour group that was about half English-speakers and half German-speakers, so the guide gave his spiel in both languages. His English was perfect, and since I grew up with German-speaking relatives, I could tell that his German was pretty good, too.

It's a shame to drop German. It's not only the official language of two countries (Germany, Austria) and one of the official languages of a third (Switzerland), but according to people I know who have traveled in Eastern Europe, it's a handy second language to know there, because people who don't speak English often speak German. (My church in Portland took in a couple of families of Bosnian refugees in the 1990s, and we German speakers had to do the communicating.)