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The Russian Language
Entry 10 Russian Mission Blog
The Russian Language
10 years ago, when Donna and her father went to Russia, one of the things she introduced me to was the Russian language. When she returned, she taught me my first word (excluding da, nyet and vodka ), sobaka… dog. I told her that if we were to return the following year, I wanted to learn a little. So we found a tutor at North Carolina State University and started taking lessons once a week. I quickly began to realize that learning Russian is a lot like getting a root canal – you don’t do either one for fun. Russian is a language with a different alphabet and a grammar structure straight from heck. ( I hear Finnish and Hungarian are worse, so we will leave Russian in heck.) It has six cases which means that every noun and adjective changes spelling and pronunciation depending on its location in a sentence, plurality and gender. It is quite complicated.
Like I said, no one learns Russian for fun and when the time came for us to set out, I was pumped to try out my year of hard work. So we landed in Moscow and boarded the train for Tel’ch’e. When we got to the train station in Mtsensk, we were greeted by Valya. One of our translators told her that I had been studying Russian and when she turned to speak to me, I just stood there. Nothing!!! I understood NOTHING she said. I thought that maybe it was the jet lag. So the following I set out to try again. With Valya… Nothing. Ira… Nothing. The children… Nothing!!! I began to wonder if I had been studying Russian at all. As the trip went on, Valya and the children pitched in and really worked at teaching me Russian. What I learned was that I was pretty good at reading and writing but seriously lacking in the speaking and listening skills. Most of my learning up to that point was in the reading and writing field, but speaking and listening require even more practice.
The main thing I came away with on that trip was that in Russian, pronunciation is everything. English words can take a certain amount of mangling and still be understood. If you mispronounce a word in Russian, you get a blank stare and a "shto?" – "what?" When Donna and I moved to Fayetteville, NC in 1999, I enlisted the help of two Russian students studying at Methodist College. One was my grammar coach and the other my pronunciation coach. Zhenya and Natasha sat with me twice a week and really accelerated my speaking and listening skills.
In 2001 Donna and I adopted two children from Severodvinsk, Russia located about 600 miles north of Moscow. Neither one spoke English so Russian was the dominant language in the house for a while and propelled me to the point where I am comfortable in Russia without a translator. Learning Russian is not for the faint of heart, those with no time to practice, or the lazy. But if you still want to learn the beautiful language of Tolstoy and Pushkin, I highly recommend it.
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3/3/08 1:07 PM
that is an amazing blog. . I really enjoyed reading that. More than anything the little faces in the photographs make your heart ache. Thanks for taking the time and blogging that. It was amazing to read. Maybe we could travel with you in 09? when were you thinking of going? Since seeing a photography exhibition in Glasgow about the plight of Russian street kids the images have never left me and I have wanted to get to visit for a good number of years. (think God is trying to say something probably) how wonderful it would be to travel with you both and meet the kids that have come to mean so much to you. We are visiting Zambia this summer to visit a youth village that we have done little bits of fundraising for. And we are doing a fundraiser in april. Can you pray for us? would mean a lot.
We love you guys lots and looking forward to seeing you soon.
Lots of love to Donna
Esther xxx