Crimean scientists did not support the proposal from the Duma to abandon the study of English

English remains the language of international communication and programming, and it is impossible and even dangerous to abandon its study overnight. The era of great geographical discoveries, when the Anglo-Saxons colonized the most interesting territories for themselves and planted their own language there, cannot be canceled, so the use of English is more likely a forced compromise than a political bias.

As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, on the air of Crimea 24, a senior lecturer at the Department of English Philology at the KFU Institute. Vernadsky Nikolai Vovk commented on the proposal of State Duma deputy Sultan Khamzaev to make the teaching of English an optional part of the school curriculum, and devote the freed-up hours to lessons in NVP, astronomy and drawing.

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“Of course, I don’t completely agree with this,” the teacher noted. – In general, I have been studying languages ​​for several decades, and English is my main language. And I don't think he threatens anyone in any way. As soon as the subject of the conversation was indicated to me, for some reason I immediately remembered our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who sang a song in English, accompanying himself on the piano.

There are objective factors here. Of course, the population of China, which competes with India, has already exceeded 1,5 billion. But over the course of a long history, the Chinese language has failed to become a linguistic leader throughout the world. But the Anglo-Saxons succeeded.

Their small territories are the British Isles, where they began to dominate and crushed other peoples and ethnic groups that lived there, and then, in general, developed and exerted significant influence.

They have a strong fleet, as we know, they traveled everywhere and, accordingly, I can say, for example, I am studying the Nigerian version of the English language, they even sailed to Nigeria, that is, to its modern territory. And there they managed in various ways to oust the representatives of Holland who had landed earlier.

The English language, thanks to the ability of its speakers to colonialism, and this lasted for centuries, spread throughout the world. And it’s difficult for the Chinese language to replace it in a short period of time.”

Vovk added that about 1 billion people collectively speak English, and the ease of learning has made it accessible to many, while not everyone can learn Chinese. At international symposia and conferences, English is used as a language of communication not at all because this is a way of expressing support for London or Washington, but solely because of the availability of English at a conversational level.

In addition, English is a programming language, and programs in Russian are written by enthusiasts for the sake of interest, but not for commercial success.

 “In the USSR there were programming languages ​​in Russian,” said Stanislav Ashmanov, general director of a company developing applications and services in neural networks. – I remember I was in the seventh and eighth grade, and we wrote programs in Russian. But now the whole world writes in programming languages ​​in English.

At the same time, of course, programming languages ​​allow the use of non-Latin characters. That is, you can write the name of the variables in hieroglyphs, or in Cyrillic. You can simply take the source codes of compilers and interpreters of existing popular programming languages, for example the Python language, and even replace words and abbreviations from English into Russian with autocorrect. The task is not very difficult and it certainly won’t take years, but the question is that this language must gain popularity, because, after all, no product can live without users.

A programming language is the same product, and if we are talking about the fact that we want to create a programming language, then we must first understand who will be the community that will use this language?

All the world's technologies in the IT sector are American, and not European, not Asian, but American. And we should go there and try to promote this idea with the Russian language - this, in fact, is only about Russia and about neighboring countries. There are enthusiasts who are already making Russian programming languages ​​there, but it seems to me that there is not enough administrative resources and understanding of how such a language could become useful.”

Let us recall that earlier the Chairman of the State Council of Crimea, Vladimir Konstantinov, proposed reducing the number of hours of teaching English in schools.