I haven't started delivering big assignments in English yet, and I think our uni is quite big on actually allowing the students to use Norwegian all the way. It's not ideal - our calculus book is in English, and the teachers use Norwegian, so every theorem has two names and it's quite hard to remember which is which. The squeeze theorem (best name) is one of the few which is directly translated; the mean value theorem has been translated to something that translated back would be "the secant sentence", and so forth, so if I get an assignment in Norwegian to apply a theorem, I need a damned dictionary to know what they are talking about half of the time. Our java programming is also an unholy mixup between English syntax and Norwegian variable names. I know that all the books on higher levels are in English, and I'm going to arrive totally unprepared, because I'll have to translate everything I know into a new language.
It's like when I had read three Wheel of Time books in Norwegian, and tried to start reading the fourth in English. Nothing made sense any more, and I had to start reading from the start again in the new language. I don't want to do that with a year of studies.
I've heard a lot of Americans that's impressed with the average European speaking two or three languages well, but to be honest, we have to know English to be able to get most average or better paid jobs, so it's not as much a big feat or a great school system than simply a necessity. And probably 70% + of the shows on TV are in English, many commercials, most slogans, store names etc. are also English. If you were surrounded by French every day, it would probably be easier to learn it. And people like us Norwegians on these boards are probably better than the average Norwegian because we write a lot of English every day, here and on meebo, and you've probably all noticed that I at times write kind of poor English (at times outright bad writing, but that's another issue entirely). Imagine how bad it is if you only use English about ten times a year, on a vacation or when a tourist asks you for directions. It's been a really long time since I've spoken English for a prolonged time, so my pronunciation is quite bad whenever someone foreign shows up at work.
Work-related; I've always wondered why the closing procedures at work only involved shutting down the electricity to all of the machines. Turns out it doesn't. Oooops! Almost got my ass fired, I think - me and the bosses had a half hour chat about proper closing procedures. For reference, I'm working in a science centre for kids - it's basically a museum where you touch everything. You've probably seen something like it. They could have spent one minutes saying "you are shutting down everything wrong and you're slacking off a bit much, but we like the acting you are doing in our science shows, so we'd like you to improve your routines and do more shows", but they spent half an hour skipping around the issue. On the plus side, if there's few customers I've started helping the IT guy, and I'm learning a lot. He's promised to see if any of the installations we have use java and if he has the source code or can get a hold of it, and that would be great.
I write too long blog posts, don't I?