To make a long story short, for one of my internships, I had to write an essay about communication during the Sochi Olympics.

After finishing this essay, I decided to see what it would take to learn Russian since the language is in high demand for my position. My first stop was a video made by a Russian-American lady in Texas, and after I was able to stop laughing from her switching between a Russian and Dallas accent, I decided there had to be a better way.

My question to any Russian speaking gamers reading this is how did you learn to speak English? Simple exposure, watching TV, playing video games in English, etc?

Let me know!

Reading and writing. As consequences, I'm very bad at speaking in either language, my English does not correspond to any specific regional variant (also, I keep to American spelling, British quotation marks, and random, usually run-on, punctuation), and I don't know how to pronounce about half the [English - Russian pronunciation is way easier to guess] words I use (though I'd recognize them spoken).

Is English in any way recommended or a school requisite? I was shocked to find out that (at least twenty years ago) you were expected to learn English in a lot of European countries; I realize a lot of people speak English but I can't imagine it's too had to get around Europe without knowing any.

This, mostly. Of course I learned english in school and university, but games gave me much more than this.
But, this way, I understand english very well(at least written), but when I try to say something it's often a disaster)

Usually, public schools teach either English or German, depending on teacher availability. When I was at school, English was considered to be more prestigious, and parents bribed school administrators to get assigned to the English group. It might not be the case now; I would think if anyone's kid absolutely has to attend a school, they should learn any other language and just absorb English naturally.

Public school language teachers were extremely, unbelievably bad. Studying consisted of rote memorization of individual words (a 1:1 English to Russian correspondence) and texts, the formula for which was "discuss a topic" or, fancifully, "elaborate on a topic". In high school, this required memorizing about a page of text. Later, schools adopted bilingual textbooks modeled after monolingual English courses such as Headway; this proved unsuccessful because the teachers were the same inept mouthbreathing babysitters. After I graduated from high school, Headway itself became the standard, at least in Moscow, not without a gentle push from lobbyists (the books are expensive), and soon after *it*, in turn, became synonymous with supreme mediocrity. I hadn't had a competent and non-alcoholic English teacher until I was studying for what is now the MSc degree (I graduated before the higher education reform). Not that I ever needed the lessons, but they were mandatory, and, come to think of it, "how to suck up to a completely shitfaced elderly lady who'd rather take a nap, is extremely annoyed at having to conduct a class, and is determined to completely obliterate the cause of her frustration" is a highly valuable lesson.

I had an actually good Spanish teacher, on my leet limited-admission public high school's payroll, who wrote the absolutely best language textbook I have ever seen. However, because the school was public and limited-admission, and a child's continued presence at school depended on the grades, the parents whose children were too stupid for Spanish demanded to have it removed from the curriculum and succeeded. (They wouldn't do dick against the alcoholic English lady, or the abusive classmistress, or the physics teacher so supremely incompetent (and alcoholic) that we actually staged protests during classes. Assholes.)

I know dick about getting around Europe. I've never left Russia, and I hardly ever leave the Moscow region.

Are you kidding? Are you aware of how many languages we have in Europe? Sure, you can get by travelling around Europe without knowing any English, provided you know German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, etc.

Oh, and of course English, if you happen to go to Britain or Ireland, both of which are in Europe.

No, English is pretty much the lingua franca (ironically) of Europe. Not everybody speak it equally well, but it is usually your best bet for making yourself understood in a country where you don't speak the language at all.

School-wise, I'm not sure how it is in the rest of Europe, but here in Denmark, we started on English (mandatory) in the 5th grade when I was in school (back in the 80s). Nowadays it's the 3rd grade, and they're talking about moving it down to the 1st grade. Personally, I think that last would be a mistake, since I think children need to learn how to read and write their own language before trying to tackle a foreign one, but there it is.

Same deal here as well.

Am bulgarian and our language is close to the russian one, gotta say video games helped me more than anything else.

XD You must be used to my stupid questions by now so I obviously wasn't kidding. Where I live all the street signs are in Finish but it's not even an option to learn in school. There is absolutely no logic to that stuff over here. :P

Pretty the same in Slovakia and in every other european country.

I've heard that the U.S. Diplomats use Rosetta Stone or something like it. I've only heard great things about Rosetta Stone.

I purchased a 30 language learning pack just to get a smidge of many kinds of language around the globe. It was fun to hear it all and learn a few phrases, but since I'm not using it daily, I forget all of it quickly.

So, get yourself saturated by it and keep using it or you lose it.

Finnish is so easy, even kids speak it!

Growing up in Germany, pupils are required to learn English (more of the British variety) from the 5th grade on. Not sure if any of that has changed since I moved to the States in '98. What was taught was to have a rudimentary understanding of its language use, at least if you attended the Gymnasium (highest level of learning; has nothing to do with sports). That said, I did learn quite a bit more outside of school since I preferred to peruse of original language material - I imported a good few English language games in the mid nineties, mainly to circumvent the ridiculous censoring that was going on in (some awfully) dubbed versions.

Sure, I had the basics down, but it didn't totally prepare me for my move to the US after 10th grade. I still had a lot to learn back then, and high school here was definitely a struggle for me the first few months. That said, school was a breeze for me once I got into swing of things as classes were generally easy in comparison to what I did before in Germany; not to mention that I felt like I was going over material I already learned a few years prior.

/ramble

I learned English in school, but mostly from playing Ultima 7 and other computer role playing games and then from reading english books. Then, later, I had an English girlfriend for a year and that helped to further improve my english.

And I learned Russian with a private teacher, just out of interest. But in the last one and a half decades I didn't have much practice so I forgot almost everything again.

So the morals of the story is: get a girlfriend in the country whose language you want to learn. It helps to stay in practice! ;-)

I actually got my Spanish to low-intermediate level through school, watching TV in Spanish, reading Spanish novels, and generally hearing it around me since it's a rapidly growing language here in the US.


My German, at best, is poor, mainly because of lack of practice, but I use to occasionally play on a German World of Warcraft server, and took 3 years of it in high school.

Also, last night, I downloaded The Witcher in Russian, but I want to get some basics of the language down before playing it.

I've heard good things about Rosetta stone. The only thing is, the "Learn Russian" version is wicked expensive at $324, so unless I decide to really dedicate myself to learning it, I don't think I'm going to be making that purchase anytime soon.

I also learned English at school, and as I was born in the GDR, we had Russian mandatory from 5th grade on, and optionally English (mandatory if you wanted to attend a higher school) from the 7th.
I still smile at how the teachers pronounced some of the English words. But that's understandable, since they also had no chance to talk to a real life native speaker.

What helped me most at that time was music. Like many young people in East Germany I was a huge fan of Depeche Mode. And even earlier of Pink Floyd (still like them both alot). But unlike the others that would just enjoy the music, I was really interested in what the people try to tell, and so I started translating all the lyrics. This showed me the limits of (East German) dictionaries. Also, a lot of Depeche Mode's lyrics were something of a riddle for me - I understood them only a few years later when I got interested in girls...

In 1988 my parents bought an used and half broken Commodore C116 for 2000 Marks. My step-father fixed it, and along with it came a few tapes with games - all in English. After the fall of the wall I bought my own C64 and had hundreds of pirated games. Then came Amiga - English games for the most part (the LucasFilm/Arts adventures were all German). By the time I finished school I was the best in English classes and very proud, but that was short-lived, when in the early-mid-nineties I went to the university. First of all, I met native speaker, that taught me that all my pronounciation was wrong. Secondly I met students from (former) West Germany had had earlier and better classes and some of them had been a year to the US or Britain. I was shattered.

But I wouldn't give up. I moved in to a Welsh roommate, attended pronounciation classes (with a very "British gentlemen" tutor, whowas in his 50's and had a taste for the female students) and a Scottish teacher, who was so shy, we had get him drunk to get him to say anything other than the teachings. Fine guy.
And the nights I would spend with some American students (who also had a taste for the German girls AND the beer). With those we had an agreement: They would speak German and we would speak English, and we would correct each other. After a few beer altough, we stayed with English most of the time :-).

Though practice I got good enough, that some Northern-English girls I sometimes hung out with asked me where from Britain I come from - after I had known them for several weeks. I was totally stumped since I had assumed they know I was German. They said, that I had a strange accent, but not German but more like someone from southern England.

Then in 1997 I moved to a different city, lost all those contacts and now my speaking skills are pretty rusty again. That's why I write long posts, to keep at least the words flowing. It's really astounding how quickly you can lose a language if you don't practise on a regular basis.