PE> Well whenever I speak to someone from Europe, I ask them
PE> if they all learnt English at school, and they say they do.

BG> What part of Europe though?  I'd expect the EEC countries
BG> to be teaching English, but not the (ex) Soviet Union,

I'm pretty sure they always did. Its quite interesting to
watch the spokespeople on TV current affairs like LateLine,
very good english lots of them.

BG> nor much of Scandinavia either.

They certainly did, I know quite a few.

And the other thing which makes a HELL of a difference now is that the
smaller countrys tend to have subtitled TV progs, which are very likely to
be in english, and that helps heaps to teach them english. Very noticeable
with the Dutch for example. Corse they often have a very guttural accent
which makes it hard to understand them, but they generally dont do
anywhere near as bad at understanding an english speaker.

PE> My wife says that it is compulsory to
PE> learn English for SIX YEARS at school.

BG> Perhaps they did at Xiayi's school, but neither do I believe that
BG> this applies to anywhere near the majority of schools in China.

I think you might be surprised.

BG> Most Chinese leaders and politicians are basically xenophobic,

Well, they are a different matter, quite a while since they were at school.

BG> and the rest of the population more or less do what they're told.

Which happens to be compulsory english in school. You could say the
same thing about the Japanese, they also have compulsory english anyway.

BG> Or has that all changed fairly recently?

The english in school was there before the cultural revolution
at least as far as I know. In fact there was considerable study
of books in english as part of that which caused considerable
problem during the cultural revolution.

--- PQWK202