It's easy for most people who's mother tongue is not English to learn it, as it's everywhere - government, media, advertisements, entertainment, you name it. So it's a necesity, not a status symbol.
It's also interesting to note that English kids generally struggle to pick up a second language, even if they live in a community that speaks another language, just because English is so pervasive, and there's no need for them to pick up a second language. This despite the fact that you have three languages at school, at least up to grade 9.
While I do think that everyone should learn English in SA, research has shown that mother tongue education (especially at primary and secondary levels) are extremely important.
There are a lot of parents doing their children a disservice by sending them to English schools.
Perhaps the difference is that there is so much English culture everywhere that you can't avoid it, while if you are not from near the Swedish-speaking areas, you will never actually use the language.
Since we start so early and never stop until we're 18, everyone just kind of accepts it as something part of life and by the time you're 18 you're perfectly fluent.
What do adolescents in your countries think of learning english?
Most anglophone Canadians start learning french in grade 4, unless their parents put them in an immersion program at a younger age. In Ontario we were required to take French until grade 9 and after that the VAST majority of us stopped because we hated it.
Is it like that with English in other parts of the world? Or is English enough of a prestige language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29) that young people enjoy learning it?