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MissPandaSloth t1_iyc0tro wrote

Reply to comment by -SPOF in Lithuania should phase out Russian language teaching - president's adviser by Interrete

It was happening naturally. Most young people are very fluent in English and just learn some Russian to get by in school. Other languages have also became a bit more popular (French, German, Mandarin).

I feel like the whole "let's push Russian out" is a bit populist and not needed, the language itself didn't do anything and again, it was being phased out "organically" already.

Company I work with had outsourced some projects to both Belarus and Ukraine, everyone's 3rd language here (Baltics) is Russian, yet, we all still communicate in English.

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mondeir t1_iyc5utj wrote

I agree that it's not really neccessary, but why even teach it? I don't plan traveling to Russia or even need to speak it professionally, so practically no use for it. I think it's good that now the focus is on other languagues because when I chose it in highschool I chose it out of sheer populism.

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Professional7Account t1_iyctl88 wrote

Redditors live in a magic world where learning new languages is easy and cheap, so it doesn't matter if the language itself has any practical application.

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MissPandaSloth t1_iyc7gkr wrote

>I agree that it's not really neccessary, but why even teach it? I

There was still a lot of trade with Russia, especially before 2010's-ish. On top of that due to Soviet Union there were a lot of Russian teachers and very few of other languages. It wasn't much of idealogical choice, more just practical.

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mondeir t1_iyc7lw3 wrote

I am talking about now. Now it's not even practical to know.

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MissPandaSloth t1_iyc8jq3 wrote

Yeah but the bigger problem is abundance of Russian teachers and lack of any other language teachers.

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Jud1_n t1_iycamdx wrote

You are not the only person in Lithuania. Maybe someone else wants to learn it. Primarily a small percentage of ethnic russian and polish families.

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I'm not sure how old you are, but choosing russian in 90ies and up to 2010 was done because knowing russian was better than not knowing it since it was akin to second language and was useful at job hunting.

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These days it's less useful due to russian warmongering cutting up bussiness ties but the main problem is also that Lithuania simply doesn't have enough teachers of other languages as compared to russian. Though given time and with the nature of how things go, that will change in the future as more and more youth focuses on other foreign languages and replaces aging teachers.

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Interrete OP t1_iyd6l30 wrote

>choosing russian in 90ies and up to 2010 was done because knowing russian was better than not knowing it since it was akin to second language and was useful at job hunting.

Excuse me, but are you from some different, alternate universe version of Lithuania?

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