Just had a flashback to my Ph.D. program in Chemistry, with an Israeli fellow grad student being really annoyed that she had to take a German class to qualify for the language requirement. (My lousy 1 semester of college french was accepted). I mean, late 1990s (as now), Chemistry publications were written in English. (Ironically, a bit of German might've been helpful for me to read one paper which I looked up for my dissertation, and I suppose Russian might have helped when I was looking up the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction as part of the background for my oral exam (but not really, as the reaction has been described a lot since then)). At least they got rid of the requirement finally, I think.