--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote: Foreign language education in countries like Japan and Taiwan shouldn't set a goal for all as "basic conversational fluency," for most citizens of those countries don't speak with any native English speaker in their entire lives (I didn't meet any till I went to college in Tokyo), and a minority of them who do need English for jobs need higher-level skills than that imaginary construct.
---
Yeah. Few people in Russia who doesn't live in Moscow or St. Petersburg or some college city with an exchange program are ever going to meet a native English-speaker. Russian is the international lingua franca in the entire former USSR (that's one-sixth of the Earth's surface, that). And when they go abroad as tourists they usually going to Turkey or Egypt, where everybody they come into contact with speaks Russian. (Because Russian tourism in those countries is big business.) What is the point in learning English? People would be better off learning Chinese. That way they could talk to the people in the market and avoid being swindled. ;)
Yet there are the mandatory English classes in school. 'Course nobody actually pays attention in those classes. The last survey said that something like 8% of the population speaks English. ;)
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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