Oh, how the worm has turned. Those of you who've been reading this blog over the past month will have followed the story of how I slithered from being determined to focus on my French to ditching it and taking up Russian instead - a language I'd not touched in thirty years and never thought I'd return to. Ever. I so did not see this coming. Why not just stick with French - conversational fluency and reading novels was just around the corner, while reaching that level in Russian is likely to take the best part of a decade! What a ludicrous undertaking... it makes no sense at all - I can't say that I feel any special affinity for Russia or its culture. It's like some shrivelled-up spores of Russian had been lying in wait deep inside my brain for decades and something somehow made them sprout tentacles. The whole thing is totally beyond my control. And it's got a lot worse since my last post.
Thursday last week I told my French teacher I'd that it was over. I would not be returning for any more classes. She looked at me, crestfallen. "No," I tried to assure her, "it's not you, it's me..." Then she got the grammar book out and beat me round the head with it for the entire last session.
That very same evening, I found myself googling local Russian teachers. Just to kill some time before bed, you understand. Just before midnight, my first Russian class was booked for Monday morning. With Yelena, a native Russian speaker from Ukraine, who, coincidentally, lives right across the street from my Portuguese teacher. She turned out to be a warm, smiley person about my age and an experienced teacher to boot. Her teaching approach is structured but not rigid - perfect for where I'm at. My first class went fairly well. We refreshed my reading and writing skills; we talked noun genders; I attempted to produce the many unfathomable versions of "shshshsh" and we had eloquent conversations like "Is this a cat?" "No, this is not a cat. It is a bag." It was all quite riveting, I assure you.
People say that your brain plays tricks on you by editing your memories to make past experiences seem less traumatic than they were at the time. Well, my mind has done a sterling job at smoothing out my first encounter with Russian (which I studied at school for two years). For example, I remember Russian to be more or less phonetic. But it so isn't! You need to know how to pronounce each word, you cannot just guess how to say it correctly from seeing it written down. And there are, of course, no rules. Sigh. But then again, English is like that...
I realise it's a bit rich for a German to be complaining about another language's words being... erm.. too long, but monstrosities like "достопримечательностями" are a bit hard to swallow for a Born Again Beginner like me. No, it's not some specialist term referring to a ceremonial method of roasting monkeys practiced by a tribe in New Guinea. достопримечательностями is basic tourist vocabulary, meaning "attractions" or "sights". Oh well. I guess I'll be practising that one in my next lesson coming up on Wednesday.
Showing posts with label learning Russian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning Russian. Show all posts
Sunday, 13 November 2016
Sunday, 16 October 2016
Is Russian Worth Another Go?
I'm rekindling an old romance. I don't think it's serious... I'm just toying with him... but you never know. His name is Russian. We parted thirty years ago, after going steady for two whole years. I left him for English. Who was a lot less complicated.
Russian was so not my idea. We ended up together because of a school friend of mine. Actually, it was her mother's fault. She was a beautiful woman, my friends's mother, whose manfriends changed at regular intervals. My friend was forever competing for her attention, and the latest beau spoke Russian. So, as soon as she got wind that the neighbouring school was putting on extracurricular Russian classes and was looking for more students to make up numbers, my friend had to go for it. But not alone.
And so, off to Russian we went. There were only seven of us. One of them was the teacher's long-suffering son, another one had long blue hair. As for the rest, I do not remember. We were taught by a flame-haired Hungarian woman who was all but four feet tall, but made up for it by sheer force of energy, killer heels and lashings of green eye shadow.
Every week, she made us take turns reading aloud from the textbook and I was terrified before each lesson because of that. I hate reading aloud. In any language. To this day. But I loved writing, and so I started writing my teenage diaries in Cyrillic script. I still have them, and I'm glad I do, because I can remind myself of how to write cursive Cyrillic. (Just in case it gets serious again.) It seems I was quite creative back then, using half a Cyrillic "х" (as in the word хорошо) to represent the letter "h", which doesn't exist in Russian. My invented cursive version looks like a back-to-front Roman "c".
My sweaty-browed weekly stammerings culminated in a glorious reward: five days in Moscow, during a time when the iron curtain was still firmly drawn shut. We ate blinchiki topped with sour cream and red caviar for breakfast every morning. My friend managed seven in one sitting. I was in awe. She was severely bulimic, which I didn't know at the time. It did, however, get her mother's attention.
We queued up in a bakery for half an hour and came out with two carrier bags full of mini-bagel shaped things that tasted of nothing and had the texture of recycled cardboard.
Russian and I are on cautious terms. So far, our dates have been limited to a daily ten-minute frisson on Duolingo - four days and counting.
I have a confession to make: I ditched Italian for Russian. Poor Italian didn't see it coming. We had a two-day fling back in early October. Yes, you could say I led him on. But it's just not gonna work out for us right now. I've already got plenty on my plate with his rambunctious brothers, Spanish, Portuguese and French. There's waaaay to much Romance in my life! It's their verbs that get to me the most: there's fifty different versions for each and every one of them; different tenses, different moods - I cannot cope with another helping of this nonsense, I just can't.
Russian, on the other hand, bypasses superfluous verbiage altogether. "She my mother." "Where Park?" "Your father here." "This not bus. This taxi". Nothing could be more attractive to me right now. Darn it, Russian is roping me right in with his seductive straight talk!
Russian was so not my idea. We ended up together because of a school friend of mine. Actually, it was her mother's fault. She was a beautiful woman, my friends's mother, whose manfriends changed at regular intervals. My friend was forever competing for her attention, and the latest beau spoke Russian. So, as soon as she got wind that the neighbouring school was putting on extracurricular Russian classes and was looking for more students to make up numbers, my friend had to go for it. But not alone.
So, you want us to walk all the way across town to learn... Russian?!
Yeah, it's gonna be such fun!
On a Friday afternoon? You think I've nothing better to do?!?
And so, off to Russian we went. There were only seven of us. One of them was the teacher's long-suffering son, another one had long blue hair. As for the rest, I do not remember. We were taught by a flame-haired Hungarian woman who was all but four feet tall, but made up for it by sheer force of energy, killer heels and lashings of green eye shadow.
Every week, she made us take turns reading aloud from the textbook and I was terrified before each lesson because of that. I hate reading aloud. In any language. To this day. But I loved writing, and so I started writing my teenage diaries in Cyrillic script. I still have them, and I'm glad I do, because I can remind myself of how to write cursive Cyrillic. (Just in case it gets serious again.) It seems I was quite creative back then, using half a Cyrillic "х" (as in the word хорошо) to represent the letter "h", which doesn't exist in Russian. My invented cursive version looks like a back-to-front Roman "c".
My sweaty-browed weekly stammerings culminated in a glorious reward: five days in Moscow, during a time when the iron curtain was still firmly drawn shut. We ate blinchiki topped with sour cream and red caviar for breakfast every morning. My friend managed seven in one sitting. I was in awe. She was severely bulimic, which I didn't know at the time. It did, however, get her mother's attention.
We queued up in a bakery for half an hour and came out with two carrier bags full of mini-bagel shaped things that tasted of nothing and had the texture of recycled cardboard.
You asked for 2000g instead of 200g, didn't you?
Next time, YOU do the talking!
Russian and I are on cautious terms. So far, our dates have been limited to a daily ten-minute frisson on Duolingo - four days and counting.
I have a confession to make: I ditched Italian for Russian. Poor Italian didn't see it coming. We had a two-day fling back in early October. Yes, you could say I led him on. But it's just not gonna work out for us right now. I've already got plenty on my plate with his rambunctious brothers, Spanish, Portuguese and French. There's waaaay to much Romance in my life! It's their verbs that get to me the most: there's fifty different versions for each and every one of them; different tenses, different moods - I cannot cope with another helping of this nonsense, I just can't.
Russian, on the other hand, bypasses superfluous verbiage altogether. "She my mother." "Where Park?" "Your father here." "This not bus. This taxi". Nothing could be more attractive to me right now. Darn it, Russian is roping me right in with his seductive straight talk!
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