he is still only ten! yet i have to give his GCSE choices for languages in by tuesday

[pukkapatch]

wtf?
he's done a tiny bit of french this year , which he hates. how is he supposed to choose between french germand and spanish for his main ones. and japanes, mandrin chinese, spanish and something else for his secondary ones? all by tuesday? he wont be eleven for at least another month.

that's mad, my ds(14) is picking his now. they change so much surely.

Dcs state grammar has a system quite similar, in the summer of y6 they have to choose a primary european language (french, german, italian, spanish), world language (Arabic, Mandarin, Urdu, Japanese) and subsidary language (off the top of my head French, Spanish, Mandarin, Polish, Latin or Greek)
I'm so pleased they have had such a wide selection to choose from BUT it would be worth finding out if which ones have more than one qualified full time member of staff teaching them because dd's subsidary polish was taught by a local woman with a TA supervising, it wasn't ideal. Also would some of the languages be dominated by chilodren who speak them at home? DS's arabic was but he didn't seem to mind and it has dragged him up to speed pretty quick but he did find it quite hard at first.

aha - have posted on education with exactly the same dilemma (and same school ) and yes they are gcse choices although if they're good at languages they get the chance to add greek or italian at 13

think ds is going for spanish and chinese ...

Just pick the languages you want him to learn. If you have no preference, then say so - or toss a coin.

The only time we have been asked to make a choice was between German and Spanish (French was a given). We were torn - German would be good because it was further from French. In the end, we opted for Spanish, because the DCs are American and that is the second language in the USA, should they want to live there and get a maid. However, they both dropped it after only one year.