Well, russian schools teach one foreign language (usually it's only English without a choice), and russian children learn English 10 years in a row, but russian teachers are very bad, and russian children are very lazy and retarded, so a lot of adult Russian people after 10 years learning English can't say anything in English, but I was taking English private lessons several years, so I learnt English when i was a teenager.
Actually I think russian education system and qualify are the worst in da world. But maybe better, than in Africa xD
It takes 8 hours using car to go from my city to Finland, so I used to be to go shopping sometimes in Finland, also I've got some suomalainen friends there, and I was so interested in Finland, that I even learnt a lot of basic stuffs of this hard language :D
Now I'm so excited with foreign languages, I started to learn sexy German, hot Spanish and beautiful French, and I want somehow to learn it all at same time, every day a little bit attention for every language, or something like that... :)