I practically live in the Mexico/US border, and still it amazes me the number of people here who can't speak English beyond a few sentences. English lessons are mandatory in most schools, but even here there's the same problem as in Germany and Belgium, schools don't know how to teach it properly and people just don't care about how important is to learn it. Even at college level I still see people who sound like they never took an English subject at school. I remember a semester when we had to write papers based on scientific articles that were in English, and a few classmates came to me offering to pay me for translating the articles for them. I'm always up for helping if someone needs a hand, but these guys were practically asking me to do their homework, and I of course refused It wasn't even that hard to get, if they took a dictionary for key words or something I'm sure they could have done a decent work, but they prefer to go the easy route and ask someone to do it for them.

Thankfully my family had these concerns too, and I took private English lessons when I was a teenager with an amazing teacher that really encouraged conversation. It was great because she was a very fun person to talk to personally instead of in a classroom full of people, and she was a native English speaker too, which really helped.
That said, I still had that "silent period" Kirauni mentioned: Even after taking lessons like those, one still gets nervous when having to be by themselves in an English speaking country. That isn't a problem in El Paso, TX (the city I frequently go to) because a lot of people speak Spanish there, so if someone sees you struggling with English they immediately assume you're Mexican and start speaking in Spanish for you. But that's not the case in other places, it does take some getting used to. And by the time I finally mastered it, I travelled to England, where I found the accent so different it that it was like starting my "silent period" all over again

Quote Originally Posted by s-tlk View Post
But it's not a particular German problem. I witness this everywhere. For instance in Spain I especially picked a young guy to ask for next the tram station: "No habla ingles". Maybe he didn't want to, but that actually happened to me a lot.
Aaah yes, as bad as Mexico has it, it's still not as bad as in Spain, where they seem to actively refuse to incorporate English in their lives. I went there for a few weeks once, it was nice to be in another country where they also speak Spanish (although somewhat differently), but I actually got to miss English, it's practically nowhere. At least in Mexico movies in cinema are subtitled, everything in Spain is dubbed and I grew tired of it very quickly. They also tend to change foreign-sounding names to fit them in their language, like for example, I know for a fact that in their Spanish dub of The Lion Guard, "Kion" will be pronounced like "Kee-on", because that's how it makes sense for them when reading it in written form. They don't do that in Mexico, at least