I asked this same question on an online forum with many international and multilingual members when I was deciding how to rank the language immersion choices for our magnet school lottery. Most of the responders said that ANY second language would be a gift and that English is so widely understood, the other language could really be chosen for reasons other than its usefulness out in the world. Many of them recommended Chinese because it is more difficult to learn later in life. Some recommended French for various reasons (language of the arts historically; easier to pronounce correctly if you learn it young; like Spanish it's spoken on this continent); and I still wonder whether I should have ranked French higher. Most of the Americans recommended Spanish, which we ended up ranking first in the lottery (we didn't get it). Interestingly, although there are lots of Germans on that forum -- it's the second most common language there after English -- nobody at all recommended German. Still, German is what we drew, so that's what DS will be learning in kindergarten.
(I took German in college so that's OK with me.) I want him to learn Spanish too, though, so in time we will see about getting him lessons in that. Perhaps French someday as well.
My husband actually voted for Japanese. (Choices here are Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese.) He doesn't speak it but he's visited the country. But since he let me have final say I ranked the languages that I thought I'd be able to decipher on the homework assignments. Still... the Japanese class will be very small, there's still time to switch to that (just until tomorrow, eek), it would probably be a great challenge for a kid who reads English at a 5th grade level already... (I do a lot of second guessing, you can tell.)
