Thread: Russians and English?

Originally Posted by Johanna

I don't know what the policies are on studying English at school in the CIS countries. But either it's not mandatory, or it was only recently made mandatory..

It depends on a particular school. During my shool time after five years of English lessons in ordinary shool (2x45min lessons a week) I was able to say only three phrases: "My name is Yuriy.","This is a table." and "Who is on duty today?"

Within the borders of the European Union, I don't think you could find a 20-year-old who could not at least speak rudimentary English.

Maybe, but there are plenty of 45+ years-old who don't speak English almost at all (At least I met some of such kind).

Then on the other hand, the Russian speaking world is so enormously big, and quite well integrated... There must surely be at least 250mil speakers of Russian... Perhaps English simply isn't needed and this is the reason for the lack of English skills. It's hard to understand what the exact situation is.

For example my wife (she is 29) doesn't speak a word in English. It isn't more understandable for her than Chinese. (That's one of the reasons I post here in English, I hate when she stands behind and reads what I'm typing ). Her native language is Ukrainian, she speaks Russian without any Ukrainian accent and feels perfectly sufficient with these two.

Originally Posted by Basil77

It depends on a particular school. During my shool time after five years of English lessons in ordinary shool (2x45min lessons a week) I was able to say only three phrases: "My name is Yuriy.","This is a table." and "Who is on duty today?"

I think in this case, Brazil and Russia are pretty much the same. In most schools, they don't focus strongly on English. We have the same 2x50min lessons per week (in general), but it's not that important, I guess, so I can relate to Basil's situation. And if they do focus on English, it's only the written part of it, so you learn to read and write, but no focus at all is given on listening and/or speaking.
That's why the language schools in Brazil are so strong. You can see an English (and sometimes English+Spanish) language school in every single neighborhood.
Even though Portuguese is closer to English than Russian is, not many people here speak English, even in an intermediate level. Among my 5 closer childhood friends, I'm the only one who has a good level of English. My best friends has only studied it at school, therefore all he can say is "My name is ....", "I'm from Brazil" and "Where is the bathroom?" =P On the other hand, among my college friends, pretty much all of them speak English in a decent level.