This paper examines language learning, specifically the German language, forstudents with another native language a Swedish. During my teaching I experiencedthat students with another native language than Swedish have more difficulties andless motivation to learn a fourth language. To find out the reason why I sent aquestionnaire to the students learning German and I made interviews with languageteachers at one senior high school. It turned out that multilingualism should ratherbe an advantage for the learning of a fourth language and not as I thought, adisadvantage. To get an answer to my problem formulation I had to continue myresearch. During the teacher interviews the Swedish merit point system came up. Isent a new questionnaire to all the students learning a third or fourth language and Imade an interview with the study career counselor. The results showed clearly thatthe merit point system causes serious problems for the students and for the languageteachers. Students mostly choose to study a modern language just to get the meritpoints and not because they are interested.