New Zealanders speak on National's second language proposal

The National Party has released a plan to give all primary school children the opportunity to learn a second language.

The policy was part of a wider education funding announcement put forward at the party's official campaign launch on Monday, in which National promised $379 million over four years to various education programs.

The proposed $160 million cash injection would provide children the opportunity to learn from a choice of ten priority languages, which the party expects to include Mandarin, French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Te reo and New Zealand sign language will also be added to the curriculum.

The finer details of the policy have come under scrutiny after Newshub posed further questions on Monday, with National revealing that the program would only cover the cost of one hour a week of language education.

According to the most recent census data Auckland has the highest number of multilingual citizens, 377,550 in total.

So we went out to ask Aucklanders what they thought of National's plan to up that number.

Watch the video.