North Korea is strengthening its foreign language education in a move to enable its people to gain advanced technology from overseas and contribute more to improving the country’s debilitated economy.

In an editorial published last week, the North’s Education Newspaper said the country should encourage students to master at least two foreign languages during their college years.

“The important way to acquire foreign languages quickly is to read more, memorize more expressions and write things in the language more often,” the editorial said. “(Students) should memorize many words used in their fields of study and make themselves fully capable of speaking the language.”

The newspaper said that strengthening language education is the “will” of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. “Kim, on various occasions, stressed the issue of strengthening foreign language education at colleges,” the editorial said.

Universities in the North designate English or Russian as the first foreign language and Chinese and Japanese as second foreign languages. Learning the first foreign languages is mandatory, and students can choose one of the two second languages.

North Korean schools have so far focused mostly on the reading aspect of language acquisition while paying little attention to speaking and writing. But there has recently been a change with educational institutions stressing the importance of speaking skills.

Last month, Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University held an English conversation contest, which was seen as unusual given that the North Korean education authorities had evaluated only students’ reading skills.

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)