I took French in school, but I don't really speak it; I think one of the main reasons people in Sweden are as good at English as we are, is that we get a lot of British and American television series and films, and we do not dub them except for very small children. Therefore you do hear a lot of spoken English and that helps you learn the language. Lovely though French is, it is a smaller language and we got very little French spoken on Swedish television. So despite taking it for six years, I don't really speak or understand spoken French. In the same way you don't get exposed to a lot of any one other language in the U.K. so it is difficult to learn another language even if you do want to; then there is the added problem when English is your first language of what other language to learn. It may not be official, but English is very much the common language in much of international communication, even between people where no one is a native English speaker. That makes it the sensible first choice for a foreign language to learn; there isn't really as clear cut a choice for native English speakers as far as I can see.