How common is Spanish as a second language worldwide?

[ag]

It is very rare in Russia and ex-USSR in general. Typically, a Russian middle/high school would offer just one foreign language starting in grade 5 or so. I do not believe any of them offer Spanish. Then, again, a graduate of such a school would, typically, barely "read with a dictionary" whichever language he would be taught. There are, however, a few schools where the foreign language starts in the primary school (these are known as "special foreign language schools"). These do provide a somewhat better language training - again, typically in just one language on offer in the whole school (very rarely you could get some choice there). Among these "special schools" Spanish is the distant fourth language, after English and German/French. In pracitce, I believe, in my time there were, perhaps, 2 or 3 schools in the entire city of Moscow and, perhaps another 2 in Leningrad where Spanish was taught. I doubt there were many such schools in other places. Still, the government did prepare a full set of official textbooks, etc. There were pretty much no other foreign languages taught in regular schools in my day, so, still, Spanish was on a very exclusive list here (there may have been a boarding school where Chinese was taught, though - at least I do remember vaguely hearing about it).