Survey shows Swiss youth struggle with national language learning

Young Swiss struggle to learn other national languages at a sufficient level for the classroom and the workplace, according to a national study on multiculturalism from the perspective of the country’s youth. The 2015 Swiss Federal Survey of Adolescents found that fewer than a quarter of the young respondents living in the French-speaking part of the country found it interesting to learn German in school, with the feeling reciprocated in German-speaking Switzerland. And the low interest level translates into students’ skills. Just 23% of youth from the French and Italian-speaking parts of the country can speak German at a basic conversational level, while 21.9% of German speakers said they don’t know any French. “Fewer than 50% of young people reach the [language] objectives set forth by their schools,” said François Grin, a professor at the University of Geneva who helped lead the study. The survey showed that 47% of German and French-speaking apprentices have ...