My language learning began early. I was nine years old and started grade 3 in a special class with the extended teaching of Russian (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026e). My peers in other classes would only begin to learn Russian, as an obligatory subject in East Germany, in grade 5. Before that I had not encountered another language but what they called my mother tongue. I did not know what was said about my Russian class in the curriculum issued by the Ministry for People’s Education, led by Margot Honecker (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026d), the wife of the head of state (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026c) at that time.
The main task of the extended teaching of Russian is that of developing – comprehensively and in a planful manner – students’ abilities and skills in spoken and written language use based on solid lexical and grammatical knowledge. Priority is given to activities in listening and speaking. The Russian language needs to be utilized in different genres in everyday life (correspondence, student meetings, cultural programs in the Russian language, watching Soviet films in movie theaters, etc.) so that students can utilize the Russian language as a means of communication. Already in beginners’ classes, students get used to Russian as the classroom language and language of instruction.
(Ministerium für Volksbildung, 1971, p. 4, my translation)
First, my teacher made me learn the Cyrillic alphabet (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026a), letter by letter. New vocabulary was given to me, whenever we had learnt the letters needed to spell the word. I saw Cyrillic as a secret code and augmented it with Tifinagh letters of the Berber language (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026f). Sadly, none of my friends ever wanted to learn the Cyrillic-Tifinagh code. My strong initial interest inoculated me against seeing Russian as the language of the Soviet oppressor only (Figure 3). Initially, repeated translation and backtranslation of simple sentences fascinated me, and my own exercises ensured learning success in class, which sustained my motivation when my classmates were less engaged.
Figure 3: Russian-language textbook, East Germany, ca. 1973
Grammar, especially the declension of nouns and adjectives and the conjugation of verbs, was the other focus in Russian class. I found the frequent textbook exercises on grammar and vocabulary easy. The frequent Повторите! (Repeat!) or Все вместе! (All together!), so that the entire class would repeat what the teacher said, bored me. Already in grade 5, my whole class of 24 students would sit in the language lab (Figure 4) once or twice a week, connected in pairs across the rows and practice a partner dialog on a practical topic like personal introductions or giving directions to a place in town. Most of the time in Russian class, we were practicing linguistic forms; the pictures, examples, and texts in their books – not only in Russian class – had prevalent ideologically infused meaning (Figure 3).
Figure 4: Language lab in East Germany ca. 1975 (Ullstein Bild, getty images)
I started my second foreign language – English – when I was 13, in line with the centralized state curriculum. And I was not interested; other things were more intriguing than a language that no one I knew spoke. In most weeks, I had to watch TV as homework in the early afternoon, the half-hour educational show English for You (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026b) with youth from the Young Communist League in England, learning about Karl Marx in London, for example. Once a week, we would meet in the language lab and, when the teacher was neither looking nor listening in, we played airplanes with the headsets, rather than taking turns filling in blanks in the textbook exercise or practicing a dialog. I found the communicative situations as far-fetched and uninteresting as the listening and reading texts: “Imagine you are meeting a comrade from a developing country who does speak neither German nor Russian. He needs to go to the post office. Please give him clear directions.” And I did many times. When I was 26 years old, I met “my” first speaker of English from an English-speaking country at Leipzig University. That was after my teacher training for German and Russian …
References
Ministerium für Volksbildung. (1971). Lehrpläne für den erweiterten Russischunterricht Klassen 3 bis 10 der allgemeinbildenden polytechnichschen Oberschule.
Wikipedia Contributors. (2026a). Cyrillic script. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script
Wikipedia Contributors. (2026b). English for you. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_for_you
Wikipedia Contributors. (2026c). Erich Honecker. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Honecker
Wikipedia Contributors. (2026d). Margot Honecker. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Honecker
Wikipedia Contributors. (2026e). Schule mit erweitertem Russischunterricht. Wkipedia. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schule_mit_erweitertem_Russischunterricht
Wikipedia Contributors. (2026f). Tifinagh. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh
