However, instead of giving inspiring
examples, telling about people, who made an outstanding career due to their
knowledge of foreign languages, they made fun of those, who do not speak
English.

One of the campaign’s billboard cites
an abstract bus driver, 35-years-old Serhiy, saying: “I don’t need English
language.”

The campaign could have
explained that the driver, as well as countless others, could communicate with tourists if they knew
English.

But the message is instead a negative
one: If you do not want to end up as a bus driver, learn English. Or, even: of
course, if you are a bus driver, your life is so useless that there’s no point
in learning English.

Another example of the campaign is
42-year-old Anzhela, who sells homemade pies in an underground passage.

Ukrainian Speaking is a campaign by
the Goglobal initiative, launched by Ukrainian lawmaker and former journalist
Mustafa Nayyem and Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the Presidential
Administration.

According to the initiative’s
website, Goglobal is not “aligned with either politics or business, rather, we
are a point of convergence of the president, the Cabinet of ministers,
embassies, cultural centers, language schools, journalists and public in the
issue of introducing the national foreign languages learning and promotion
program.”

Many people, however, reacted with
outrage at the latest promotional campaign.

The video, as well as the pictures of
the billboards by Ukraine Speaking, went viral with social media users saying
the campaign put people in categories.

“We can also say: ‘I am from Donbas,
I don’t need English,’ ‘I am a girl, I don’t need English.’”, wrote Olexandr
Humaniuk on his Facebook page.

Another Facebook user, Anna Bas, lashed out at one more campaign’s billboard that says: “You can live without
English. On the minimum wage.”

“Teasing about minimum wage in the
country, where many people of the different – including socially important –
professions live/survive on Hr 1,200-1,500 ($46-58) per month (when the
trimester of English studying in a decent language school costs over Hr 4,000
($154) – very motivating. These are not the things that someone should appeal
to people with,” she wrote on her page.

Initiative’s authors told reporters
they did not mean to humiliate anyone, saying they chose “such a provocative
tone to cause the discussion in the society.”

They definitely triggered a
discussion. I am not even saying that it didn’t work – maybe it changed
someone’s life and people rushed to language schools.

I am saying it would be nicer if,
while motivating the young generation, the campaign didn’t humiliate
significant numbers of Ukrainians who don’t know English.