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Comment by LV-426 | Hacker News Reader

> English is tought as a second language (or third language in bilingual countries) in most of the world.

In primary schools, commonly?

In Russia, for example, it's one of the common subjects you start studying in middle school and continue up to the last year in high school. Also almost each college/university course also has English as one of the subjects with inclination towards the course major, e.g. more chemistry-related topics if your major is chemistry, etc.

Thanks. You may not be old enough to know from experience, but how does this differ (if at all) from the Soviet period?

AIUI Soviet citizens didn't generally learn English in (high/middle) school, which I always thought a bit surprising (assuming that's correct), and for some reason I have the idea German may have been taught in the USSR. (An idea which may simply derive from Russian being taught in East German schools.)

Well, I was born in 1978 and did experience the last years of the USSR, but I also know from my parents` experiences and from the old text-books, that there was a foreign language taught in Soviet middle/high schools and colleges for decades. Upon some research I've found that a foreign language was introduced as a common subject in to the schooling programmes in 1927 in the USSR. Initially that was German. Even in my school years I know that German, French, Italian and Spanish were still taught in schools, but English was more popular.

It would be surprising if they didn't study foreign languages in schools in the USSR considering that the country was surrounded by "enemies".

Thanks. And yeah, that's one reason I always thought it was surprising if they didn't teach English, since it was the (primary) language of 'the enemy'. Plus whatever faults the USSR may have had, education seemed to be pretty good.

Yes and some much ealier than Iran, I’ve studied English since the second grade until 12 (age 7-18) both written and verbal exam are also required to attain a high school diploma.

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