Why is Russian one of the main languages taught in schools?

[notevenat20]

I have always wondered this. Secondary schools always teach French but if they do more languages it will be German , Spanish or Russian.

Why Russian? It has little importance for business and people don't tend to go there for holidays. There are not many Russian people in the UK either relatively speaking. Where has this idea come from?

It's not? French, German or Spanish is standard. Some throw in Latin and Mandarin.

I did Russian and Spanish at school in the 90's. Very good girls' comp.

SPGS teaches Russian.

DD does Russian and loves it (she's in Y9). I wouldn't say it was particularly popular though. They can also choose from French, Chinese, German, Spanish & Italian and anecdotally it is Spanish, French and Italian that tend to have high numbers taking them.

I had to google SPGS :)

Now I am wondering why they offer it.

I’m another one who had no idea what SPGS was referring to! St Paul’s Girls’ School, an Independent in London to save anyone googling.

Schools in London and Kent do teach it

Schools in London and Kent do teach it
So where Russians live, schools teach Russian

colour me surprised

No Russian taught in the schools here, but mandarin is taught in the 5 schools closest to me.

I had to learn Russian from scratch in my first year at Uni. My year had maybe 2 students who had studied it at school. The rest were like me.
Who studies it at school?

Who studies it at school?
Russian speakers who want a guaranteed high grade GCSE

Schools in London and Kent do teach it. So where Russians live, schools teach Russian

Are there many Russians in Kent?

I did a bit of Russian at school in the 80s (state grammar). DS's school (independent) has it as an option. I suspect it depends to an extent on teaching staff. If you've got a Russian teacher who's good and who's been at a school for a while, then the language is likely to self-perpetuate. The Russian teacher at DS's school is excellent and very popular, so the take up is quite good. If that teacher left, then I wonder whether the subject would decline.

I started secondary school in the mid eighties, during the cold war, and everyone wanted to study Russian. Up until then, schools only really offered European MFL, as they were the most useful for business. By the time I was in the sixth form and at university, everyone wanted to learn Japanese because the economy was booming there. Post 9/11, Arabic was the language du jour along with Mandarin once China opened up for business.

We are aren't great at encouraging learning languages in the UK. A lot of schools still teach French as the default MFL because that is what we have always done because it is the closest country and French was the language of diplomacy. It isn't necessarily the most useful MFL.

I don't think Russian is offered as a main language at many schools but I think the answer why those schools offer it would probably be the same as why all schools teach French, it's historical. They started teaching it because it was the most desirable language skill at the time and have just carried on.

My secondary school and sixth form offered it. I always regret not taking it because I went on to study a number of Romance languages and Russian would have added a completely different dimension to my language learning.

If you took German, french and Russian, you'd have a springboard to most of Europe's languages. Not so much if you study french, Spanish and Italian as I did!

And I don't think any language is useless. A level Tibetan or Basque would demonstrate the ability to rise to an intellectual challenge and immerse yourself in another culture.

I did an extra GCSE in Russian in 6th form. One of the music and junior school teachers taught it. I think 3 of us took the exam, one took Russian at degree level.

Couldn't remember enough to get past the initial test on Duolingo 20 years later, German (learned for 3 years) and Latin (4) stuck a lot better.

I think that learning one of Latin, German or Russian in a formal way is very good for grammar acquisition, and probably easier for students coming through now than those of us educated in the late 80s/early 90s who did zero grammar terminology at primary school! Possibly Ancient Greek would serve the same purpose, but coping with an inflected language really helps parts of speech stick in your memory!

As an aside, I think the fact that the UK doesn't have an 'obvious' main foreign language is good in some ways (because its good that different schools can offer different things), but I think it's also contributed to the fragmentation and decline of language teaching (because it's not self-evident that everyone should learn eg French). When we were looking at secondary schools, a lot of them had perhaps two or three students out of 250 taking a language at A level, which I find desperately sad.

To add - if I had my way, all primary aged children would learn Latin (say from Year 5 upwards) and we'd go back to having a compulsory MFL GCSE.

if I had my way, all primary aged children would learn Latin
Pretty pointless for the kids who struggle to read and write English

Not at all. (Certainly no more so than learning French/Spanish, which are (theoretically) a compulsory part of the primary curriculum already.) The process of learning Latin is incredibly helpful when you're trying to learn another language, including English. I would put money on the fact that a child trying to learn English would get more benefit from a basic study of Latin than from a series of SATS-based sessions on expanded noun phrases and fronted adverbials.

"The process of learning Latin is incredibly helpful when you're trying to learn another language, including English. "

English is not a Romance language. Neither is German or Russian.

IMO the effort of trying to do Latin, to help you learn some other language, would be better spent on the language you actually want to learn.

Fair enough. Personally I disagree though. I found the formality (yet relative simplicity) of learning basic Latin structure and grammar to be an extremely useful tool in helping to understand the structure of other languages, not only French but also (perhaps particularly) German and Greek. Perhaps that's partly about how the language tends to be taught, not just about the language itself. The fact that the vocabulary has different roots doesn't prevent that. I've never had to learn English as a non-native speaker, but I imagine the same would apply. IME people who study Latin tend to have a particularly good understanding of English grammar.

I share Winston Churchill's opinion on the learning of Latin.

You only have to look at our current Prime Minister to see the dreadful damage it can cause to developintg brains.

I always say that Latin is the most useful useless subject that I ever studied. It has been incredibly helpful in learning other languages with more complex grammar than English but learning Russian or Arabic would have served the same purpose and been more useful. It's also been quite useful in my career as lots of the professional terms have Latin or Ancient Greek (I did that too) origins but still, not as helpful as being fluent in a MFL would have been.