The Telopea Park School student is fluent in French, having attended the bilingual Telopea Park primary school since the age of five. When she reached year 7, however, Noemie decided to challenge herself with an added language - Japanese.

''I decided on Japanese because it is interesting, it is a completely different alphabet, but also it is useful, because Japan is close to Australia and I thought it would be practical to learn the language.''

With a French dad and a Hungarian mum, Noemie feels a certain affinity with Europe, and she maintains that French is still a relevant language in many countries beyond Europe, such as Africa.

But the year 10 student, who cannot yet decide between a career in theatre, music or working overseas for an NGO, wants to keep her options open, and believes Asian languages are important in the jobs market.

In what would surely be affirming for the Prime Minister, who announced yesterday Korea was being dropped from the list of four priority Asian languages in favour of Hindi, Noemie said she was interested in picking that language up, too, sometime down the track.

Telopea's deputy principal, Tom Kobal, said it was heartening to see any language learning being encouraged by government. While Telopea is the territory's largest specialist French school, with about one third of each year group studying French in the high school and the primary school teaching bilingual education, Mr Kobal said Japanese and Indonesian were equally as popular as Italian, Spanish and German when it came to subjects.

''There are huge benefits for students to feel they are part of an international community and there are proven broader learning benefits from studying language.''

He said studying grammar at a theoretical level in another language had flow-on effects in English achievement - with Telopea's NAPLAN results in grammar and punctuation well above average.

While the white paper's language commitments were welcomed in principle by education groups across the nation yesterday, the issue of training enough teachers to teach mandatory Asian language subjects drew concern from the Australian Education Union.

ACT branch secretary Glenn Fowler said: ''We support a focus on all languages, but we would be concerned if there are not enough teachers to teach them in a meaningful way.''

Mr Fowler said the uncosted announcement would mean little without significant government investment. ''The white paper, as a document of ideas, is worth following up but until we see the investment we will reserve our judgment,'' Mr Fowler said.

Likewise, Dean of Education at the University of Canberra Geoffrey Riordan said it was a ''fitting aspiration for a country like Australia to be more fluent in Asian languages, but how the government will go about implementing it remains the challenge''.

While most Australian primary schools had a mandatory language requirement, Professor Riordan noted the high attrition rates in language learning in the senior years.

According to the white paper, there has been a steady drop-off in Asian language learning over the past decade. It found 94 per cent of students studying year 12 Chinese come from Chinese backgrounds and while Japanese is the most popular Asian language in Australian schools, student numbers had fallen 16 per cent between 2000 and 2008.