The line graph compares the proportion of Canadian students who learn various

second languages in high school over a 8-year period starting from 2006.

At first glance, it is noticeable that the number of students learning French and
Chinese witnessed an upward trend, while the opposite pattern can be seen in
the remaining. Furthermore, young children evidently preferred to choose
French, Spanish and Japanese as their second learning languages rather than
Chinese, German and other languages.

Commencing at nearly 30 percent in 2006, the figure for French increased to

approximately 35 percent in the next 2 years. From 2009 to 2013, it is clear that
there were insignificant fluctuations in the proportion of French learners between
33 percent and under three tenths, ending with exactly 30 percent by 2014. In
2006, the number of high schoolers who learnt Japanese was approximately the
same as at the starting point of French. However, the figure was on the decrease
to roughly 17 percent by 2014 with some fluactuations from 25 percent to 15
percent during this term.

Spanish and German were more prevalent than Chinese and other foreign
languages, with more than 20 percent and 14 percent respectively in 2006. In the
subsequent five years, Spanish exceeded Japanese to become the second
preferred language among high schoolers. Conversely, there was a downward
trend in the percentage of German learners, with the figure dropping from 15
percent in 2007 to only 7 percent by 2014. Although from 2006 to 2010, the
proportion of Chinese remained stable at 5 percent, there was an upsurge to
approximately 15 percent in 2014.The rate of students learning other languages
reached the highest point of about the same as at the ending stage of Chinese
by 2013, however, fell to only 1 percent after only 1 year.