Today there are many language schools and courses offering a wide variety of programs for learning English.
It is difficult, for example, to imagine a modern person who cannot work on a computer, who does not distinguish between major trends in music and art, or who does not speak English. Knowledge of English has firmly entered the notion of necessary skills for everyone. More and more often, questions about language proficiency appear in job application forms where this was not required before. Moreover, attention is paid not only to formal language skills like 'I read and translate with a dictionary' – preference is given to those who can speak English fluently and naturally.
Meanwhile, it is spoken English that is not so easy to master. Firstly, in secondary school the approach to learning English has changed little since Soviet times – the main focus is on reading, translation, and retelling skills. And there is no opportunity in a large class to pay attention to each child, which is necessary for developing conversational speech. Furthermore, at school children already have a language barrier that is difficult to overcome, and the school system is not designed for this – English is taught based on Russian, and a person gets used to constructing a phrase first in Russian even in conversation, and then mentally translating it into English. As a result, speech is slow, unnatural, and vocabulary is rather limited.
How to break out of this system? The simplest way is to start learning English in childhood. Learning English for children is easier to start, because, as a rule, teaching young children involves a fun game in which new words and expressions are memorized as if by themselves. Children are not afraid to make mistakes or do something wrong. And most importantly, at preschool age children still have the opportunity to speak English as a native language, subconsciously assimilating the correct forms of words and the principle of sentence construction. Such a child will not have to dig into a dictionary or pocket for an English word.
The best thing is to enroll the child in English courses for children, where he will be able to communicate with other little polyglots. This will give many advantages – the child's vocabulary will be active rather than passive, the teacher will help to set the correct intonation. In addition, during the learning process the child will surely learn many interesting facts about the history and culture of the country whose language they are studying – in this case England. As for learning formal grammatical structures and learning to read and translate, that can be done at school.
If an adult needs language knowledge, there is no reason to be upset. Today there are many language schools and courses offering a wide variety of programs for learning English. You can choose the duration of study, teachers (native speaker or Russian specialist), focus (general vocabulary, business, preparation for a tourist trip). In addition, many courses offer at the end of training to take a language proficiency test and receive a certificate that can be presented when applying for a job or to a university.
If you are very determined, you can even enroll in a university abroad. True, for this you will need to pass a special exam like IELTS, but the language knowledge that can be acquired through long immersion in the language environment and culture is worth it.