How I learned English as a foreign language

It’s been a long journey and there is no end in sight!

I started at the age of nine. It was in the late 1980s. Starting from middle school (grade five in the Soviet system) there was always a mandatory foreign language class, English or German. Taking English was more common.

For the most part, it was useless — learning English at my Russian school. Even if you were an A-grade student, you could never become truly good, let alone fluent, in a language just by learning it at school. Keep in mind that I was a child of the Soviet era…