I am back, as promised, to fill you in on my first month of Russian Language class at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). For starters, the language is beautiful but complex. For example, Russian uses cases to show what function the noun plays in the sentence. There are six cases, with a singular and plural form, meaning any noun could have up to 12 forms (6 singular and 6 plural).
Here’s one example of the six cases for the noun “table” with the singular followed by the plural form:
- Nominative: стол, столы
- Genitive: стола, столов
- Dative: столу, столам
- Accusative: стол, столы
- Instrumental: столом, столами
- Prepositional: на столе, на столах
Cases don’t just apply to adjectives either, they also change pronouns, number and adjectives. They are very useful, however, because Russian word order is fluid, and cases help distinguish the sentence’s subject from its object. The best example I can give you is to compare it to English. Cases were very popular back when Old English was spoken, but they’ve gradually gone away over time. The only place they still exist is with personal pronouns, specifically:
- subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever),
- objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever) and;
- possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose).
Forms such as I, he and we are used for the subject (“I kicked the ball”), and forms such as me, him and us are used for the object (“John kicked me”). [Citation: Wikipedia] Okay, enough about cases. That got a bit excessive, but I hope you learned something new! Challenging, but useful sums cases up nicely.
On the first day of class we were given an inch-thick introductory textbook, along with a smaller second book devoted exclusively to our handwriting practice in Cyrillic cursive. I assumed these would be take us through 3 months or so. Nope–this was what we’d be covering in the first 3 weeks of class!
And that, friends, encapsulates the biggest challenge I’ve had with the course–the pace. It’s like high school Spanish on steroids. We learned the 32 letter alphabet in the first week, and 50 new vocab words a day for the two weeks after that (after a month, I now know over 500 words).
Getting the alphabet down was hard (only four out of 33 look and sound the same as English–B, K, M, T). Four more look like English vowels and pronounce relatively similar (A, E, O, Y). The six that trouble me most look like an English letter, but are associated with a different sound in Russian (backwards N (и), backwards R (я), H, P, C, X). Take backward N, for example. It looks like an N, is pronounced like long e or “ee”, and is represented in Cyrillic cursive by a “u”. That is two mental conversions just to get that letter down on paper! Insanity!
But let’s not forget the whole host of other new, crazy-looking letters like: й ц г ш щ з ф ы п л д ж э я ч б ю. And I’d be remiss not to mention the soft sign (ь), which doesn’t make a sound of it’s own, but changes the sound of the consonant before it ever-so-slightly (I still struggle to hear the difference). I’m not a fan of soft sign; could definitely do without it.
At the end of the third week–to wrap up our first textbook–we had to write and give a memorized presentation about ourselves in Russian (see below for mine). It was only about a minute and a half, but damn did I stress about it. I stress about Russian a lot, unfortunately, but am working on mellowing out about it. I tell my brain that there’s nothing at stake, but it insists on getting all worked up over school-related things. Must be a leftover bad habit from my old school days.
I’ve gotten pretty good at reading and translating written Russian, but my brain freezes up more often than I’d like when speaking. And since there are only four of us in the class, it’s my turn every few minutes. The worst, however, is when I open my mouth to speak and all I can think of are Spanish words. I imagine my brain saying, “Why do we need to learn another way to say this when we have two perfectly good ways already??”
I haven’t been in school in 15 years and it shows. Middle-age learning feels different, like my brain is rusty and actively rebelling against doing the work. Conjugating takes loads of brain power, and in Russian you often have to convert the endings on three or four words in a given sentence. And let’s not forget all the memorizing, which I used to be a Rockstar at, but now seem to suck at. Suffice to say, it’s been a very humbling experience.
I notice that class days seem to fall into one of two categories, either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Good days I’m flying high from stringing together a few great sentences or understanding the bulk of what the teacher said. On those days I can see how far I’ve come and am amazed by what I’m able to do already. Conversely, bad days are really rough. I often fantasize about quitting on those days. A bad day is full of errors–on my worst days I think I’ve been corrected over 50 times in the course of 5 hours of class. I freeze up when it’s my turn to respond to a question, and bumble my way through pronunciations of both new and familiar words when asked to read aloud. I leave class feeling like an idiot, wondering why I’m even bothering with this (my inner critic has had lots to say about Russian).
And because of the pace and the fact that I feel behind all the time from the crushing amount of new material, I feel compelled to study all day long. No joke, my life now consists of writing from 6 to 7:30, class from 8 to 3, household stuff and errands from 3 to 6, Russian homework from 6 to 9, then a bit of reading before lights out at 10. Russian has officially consumed my life.
The bummer is that 3 hours of homework only gets me through my written work, and I’m supposed to be doing daily listening practice and word memorization as well. To compensate, I’ve been studying for large chunks of time on the weekends so that I don’t fall too far behind. I recognize that this pace is not sustainable in the long run, but I’m not really sure what to do about it other than keep studying nonstop, since all the material builds on prior lessons and I don’t want to be the one that’s holding my group back due to lack of understanding.
Speaking of that, it’s 7:30 AM, so I need to switch over to Russian now and write up this week’s memorized monologue (we finished another set of books–Basic 1–and we do a presentation combining everything we’ve learned at the end, which is roughly every two weeks). Wish me luck! I’m going to try typing in Russian for the first time on my newly-outfitted, dual-language keyboard. Isn’t it cool?!
