Iran intends to replace English as the second foreign language in the country’s educational system with other languages, including Russian and has started negotiations with the Russian Ministry of Education and Science.
This was announced by Iran’s Education Minister Seyyed Mohammad Bathaei at a meeting with Vyacheslav Nikonov, the chairman of the State Duma Committee for Education and Science during his three-day trip to Moscow.
“The government’s education policy is to end the monopoly of the English language as a second foreign language and to introduce other foreign languages, in particular Russian,” Bathaei said.
Sputnik discussed how quickly the Russian language will take root in the Iranian education system, and what difficulties there may be along the way, with Iranian philologist and the head of the faculty of foreign languages of the Azad University in Tehran, Dr. Mohsen Shojaie.
“If you look at it in terms of morphology, then English is much closer to the Persian language than Russian: both by pronunciation, by structure and by syntax. The first difficulty in mastering the Russian language, which students face, is the correct pronunciation of words and letters. In this regard, the Russian language for Iranians is much more complicated than English. Therefore, we can say that for most Iranians, Russian is considered one of the most difficult languages to study.”
Source » sputnik