Why don't people in the Czech Republic want to speak English?

1. First of all, some people do. People in the service industry in popular tourist places, like Prague or some of the nicer hotels scattered throughout the country, speak English pretty well.
2. Gymnazium students and university students often speak English well and enjoy meeting other students from abroad and English is more often than not, the language which they use to communicate.
3. There are also many workers who deal with couterparts in other companies abroad who are competent enough in English. It's their job, they use it when they need to: and it gets them the results they need.

Most older people don't. There are several reasons for this.

1. During the Communist times, Russian was required learning for everyone and German was a close second.(Prior to World War Two, German was much more popular as the Czech Republic(or Czechslovakia) did not exist prior to 1918: it was just a part of the greater Austrian-Hungarian empire.).As a result, English was not nearly as well-known and after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 there was a real dearth of English teachers. This state has been rapidly improving ever since. But many older generations (read 45+) have had to start their English learning career late in life.
2. There are small things that inhibit it: for example, TV programs are rarely shown in the original language, with subtitles. This puts the Czech Republic at a significant disadvantage in learning English as compared to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, where people hear English on TV from childhood.
3. Czechs are not an especially  gregarious nor demostrative people, on the whole: they are a little shy.  Adult Czechs have been conditioned to fear their own mistakes. Since learning languages necessarily involves making a lot of mistakes, this is a real inhibition to their learning. Any teacher teaching English to adult beginners must work hard to break down these barriers of fear and social disadvantage that any language learner has.
4. I've noticed that some adult learners in the Czech Republic really like rules. They feel comfortable in a learning milie in which grammatical rules are laid down in an orderly fasion that they can note down. As a result, sometimes they can produce even complex sentences 'correctly' when coached well and drilled; but they still have difficulty 'flying' in conversations, i.e., forgetting the rules and just focusing on communicating. They get hung up on the idea of making mistakes and that inhibits them. And they feel stupid. Nobody likes to feel stupid:  clever people, especially, resent it. This might result in an attitude that can seem as if they don't want to speak English; but in reality they are just afraid of sounding stupid.
5. Finally, there is not always a great need for English inside the Czech Republic. This is not a multi-cultural country; economic migrants here(Romanians, Ukraneans, Bulgarians, etc) usually learn to speak Czech. While the manufacturing industry does have a need for English, not every job does. Many 20 year olds with good English end up at 35 having hardly used it at all for a decade--and language of course is something you lose if you don't use.

The situation is changing. Ive seen a massive improvement in English skills for young people in the 13 years I've lived here. Oh, young people were always better at English than older people: but nowadays I see a lot more highly advanced teenagers(C1 or even C2 level on the CEF--Common European Framework) than I did ten years ago. Some of the technical or vocational schools lag behind in teaching English, which is a pity because that means a lot of technicians and engineers start out with a disadvantage as compared to gymnizium students, who tend to have the best knowledge of English among young people.

Written 11 May 2016