Czechs have average foreign language skills, above-average need for foreign language

How do Czechs’ foreign language skills compare to those of other European nations? At first glance, good – squarely within the European average. But in a small country with an above average need for foreign language skills, good may not be good enough, and in some cases there are more jobs than there are linguistically qualified job-seekers to take them.

The Czech Republic has come a very long way with foreign languages since it opened its doors to the West in 1989. But while the comparison to days of old shows great success, the comparison with the rest of Europe lags behind in certain key respects. The latest Eurostat statistics on language ability in Europe look good for the Czechs at first sight, putting their self-perceived ability to speak one or more languages squarely within the EU average. One-third claims to “know” a foreign language, another third knows two languages or more. That ranking becomes much less important though when one considers how much more Czechs need foreign languages than the countries that are behind them on the list – all of the EU’s seven largest states. That necessity was very clear to Dr. Karel Klusák, a former English teacher who just after the revolution founded what is today one of the Czech Republic’s largest companies providing study abroad courses, Intact.

“We don’t have the advantage of native English speakers. Czech is a very bizarre language, only ten million people speak it, it’s quite difficult, nobody understands it except Slovaks and maybe the Poles, so for us it is crucial [to speak foreign languages]. Another thing is that we are an exporting country. So as a small country in the middle of Europe that exports a lot, we have to be able to speak foreign languages to succeed.”

While by far the best way to learn a foreign language may be to study abroad, with an average national wage of less than 1,300 USD a month, most students in most families are confined to the textbook. Grade school classes provide on average 140 hours of foreign language instruction a year nowadays, but the number of native foreign language teachers remains low and the best that many students achieve is good reading and writing skills, with speaking and listening skills neglected. Lukáš Sedláček is the president of the Oxford & Cambridge Alumni Society and a frequent commentator on educational issues. He sees yet other problems in the system of teaching foreign languages.

Lukáš Sedláček

“I wouldn’t say the situation is totally disastrous, we’re teaching English at the primary and secondary school level, but I’m not sure if it’s being done at the desired amount of classes per week. And we are not doing very good at teaching kids at a very early stage, when I think it is best to teach someone a language without all the grammatical rules; it’s much more natural for younger students to learn foreign languages. So I think we are failing in this first, early level of learning languages.”

Meanwhile, the popularity of English itself presents a certain problem. A fresh poll conducted by the Czech-German Chamber of Commerce suggested that knowledge of German was highly valuable to three out of every four companies – a claim that even a cursory glance at general job listings immediately backs up. Meanwhile, for 42% of those companies the availability of German-speaking staff in the Czech Republic was unsatisfactory, essentially indicating that plenty of career advancement on the Czech job market is missed out on due to the concentration on English rather than the language of the Czech Republic’s main trade partner, Germany. The third most popular language among students, Russian, is also increasingly popular among employers.

There is another, more general factor of Czech language aptitude that money doesn’t buy. According to Eurostat, of those who speak foreign languages, Czechs were amongst those most prone to doubt their high-level of proficiency; in part a question of confidence that Dr. Klusák says gets to the heart of the problem.

“What’s important is for people to have ambition. That’s what we lack; Czechs in general don’t have enough self-confidence. A lot of people underestimate their skills and they are not ambitious enough. In the U.S. the educational system produces people for whom the sky is no limit – they think they can become anything, which is positive. It motivates them to work harder and achieve something.”