Background

I am supposed to have a degree in Russian, but never really learned the language even after four years of college. My first attempt at learning Russian after college taught me definitively how much I had not learned as a student. It was in 2002, when we spent a month in Russian-speaking Ukraine and I underwent a total-immersion effect for several days as I tried to serve as interpreter for Gerry who was looking for lost relatives. I (re)learned a lot and left Ukraine thinking that with some effort I could make up for those ill-spent student days of mine. So soon afterwards I attempted for the first time in my life to read a book in Russian. It was a detective story translated from Swedish of all things and I bought it for 25¢ at the New York City public library. At first, I spent an hour or two per page. It might sound dreadfully painful, but I am a fan of crossword puzzles and so puzzling out a Russian sentence was no more painful than trying to figure out the solution to a British-style cryptic clue. [If you think the New York Times is the be-all and end-all of crosswords, I recommend that you try the London Times crossword for a different crossword experience.] And it did get a little bit easier. By the end I think I was reading a couple of pages an hour: a four-fold improvement. But by the time I was half way through the book, we had left the New York area where I had access to Russian speakers and had started travelling through the United States to Mexico and Central America. Once south of the border, Spanish took over all of my language-learning energy. Besides by then I was convinced that the only way to become fluent in Russian was to spend more time in a Russian-speaking environment and so one day when we were trying to slim down the amount of stuff we were carrying, I gave the Russian book and Russian dictionary away.

We had tried to get visas for Russia when we were in Ukraine, but found the red tape so off-putting and the price so high we went to Poland and the Czech Republic instead. After that experience I never really expected to ever get to go to Russia, so imagine my delight when in Paris in May 2005 I glanced at a notice board at Sciences Po (a French university specializing in economics and politics) and found someone advertising an apartment sublet in Moscow for the summer. Perhaps even more amazing was that everything fell into place and early July found us flying into Domodedovo airport at the beginning of a three-month stay. This was my chance. In some indefinable way I felt this was my last chance. If I didn't master Russian now, I would never manage to get back to it. Life is too full.

Armed with great enthusiasm and access to Russian TV and radio I didn't believe I could possibly fail. But in fact in most respects I did. At the end of our two months I still could not understand the evening news and in spite of having worked through two novels, reading was still a chore that constantly required a dictionary in hand. My spoken Russian had made little progress in spite of what I thought were significant efforts, but almost everyone I ever needed to speak to spoke better English than I did Russian. I would talk to a clerk in Russian, turn to Gerry to discuss the reply in English and next thing the clerk would interrupt in English. I tried hard to insist that they let me speak Russian, but almost every time, Gerry would answer the clerk in English and there went my Russian practice. It didn't only happen in Moscow. The same thing happened in Paris, too. Yes the land of language chauvinism has been converted into an Engish-speaking paradise. I hated it, of course. I didn't want to help others practice English, I wanted to practice French. Most annoying was the fact that I always felt that my French was better than their English, something I couldn't say about my Russian.

The picture changed somewhat when we left Moscow and started a trip from Moscow, via the so-called Golden Ring to St. Petersburg. Suddenly my spoken Russian was needed. Asking directions, ordering food, buying tickets. Out in the suburbs, many fewer people spoke English which meant not only that I had more opportunity to speak Russian, but also that my interlocutors were more forgiving about me mangling their language. Best of all was the week we spent in St. Petersburg, where our host, Lydia Nikolayevna, spoke no English but was open and communicative and very patient with my stuttering, ungrammatical Russian.

And then, suddenly, it was over and we were on the plane back to London. I hadn't made my goal of fluency and yet, strangely perhaps, I haven't given up. While in Moscow I had made a couple of trips to Dom Knigi, the city's biggest bookstore chain, and so have a stock of Russian novels to read, and for some of them MP3 versions as well. I have become a confirmed fan of so-called audio books, but especially those delivered in MP3 format. The spoken language doesn't need anywhere near the fidelity of music and so MP3 is more than adequate and, much more important, with MP3 you can get a whole book on a single CD whereas in non-compressed format, a book can take up six or even ten CD's! So armed with printed and recorded books I plan to read and listen my way to fluency. Because there will be a next visit to Russia I'm sure and when there is I'm going to be one rung higher on that learning ladder. Just you wait and see!

The Sounds

In my first couple of weeks in Russia, listening to the TV news was an exercise in futility. All I perceived was a constant stream of noise. I could hardly make out a single word. By the end of the eight weeks I spent in Moscow, I could understand perfectly everything that was repetitive: "Brought to you by.." "This is xxx reporting from yyy". You know what I mean. Furthermore, the stream of sound now had shape. I could tell that there were separate words and could understand maybe a third of them. Unfortunately, however, the third I understood were not the most significant and so I caught very little of the substance of any report except where the picture gave me enough added information.

When I was in college, I don't remember spending too much time in the language lab listening to either Russian or French. Having spent a very intensive and very successful six months living and working in France, that was probably no great loss to my French. In Russian, however, it might have made a big difference and not at such great cost. For example, since leaving Russia I have tried to spend at least an hour a day listening to Russian. I have a five-gigabyte MP3 player and MP3 recordings of Chekhov short-stories, a Gogol novella, a Dostoyevsky short story, one detective novel and one classical novel. I find it rather difficult to listen to a recording without having first read the written text, which in some cases is available and others not. But even without the written text by dint of listening repeatedly to a text, meaning does emerge out of the fog. Not as quickly as I would like, but undeniably nonetheless.

The Written Word

My friend Paloma cannot fathom why I would subject myself to the repeated burden of looking up words in a dictionary. Now Paloma is not someone ignorant of how to learn a language as she is herself a polyglot. But we all have our predilections and using a dictionary is not one of hers. For me, the written word has become a must-have support. I blame the lack of it for my abysmal failure to learn Farsi and Chinese. I find it absolutely fascinating to start a book by having to look up almost every other word and by dint of repeated trips to the dictionary to ever so slowly and ever so gradually reduce the frequency to once or twice a paragraph and hopefully eventually to once or twice a page. I don't think I ever used a dictionary so relentlessly in college, although perhaps the more structured environment made it less necessary, or I simply don't remember.

My current goal is to read at least ten pages per day of whatever Russian book I am reading. Had I done that in college, slow as the pace seems, over my four years in college I could have read, say, fifty pages a week or six weeks for a 300-page book, let's say one book per term, or twelve books over the entire four-year course. How could one not understand a language having read twelve books in it? Well, I didn't manage it when I was a student, but I figure that if I manage it now then how much better prepared I will be when next we find a sublet in Russia. Right now I have a children's story book, three detective novels, a collection of essays, two classical novels, and a historical novel. Surely I'll be able to claim some fluency in Russian once I've read all that!

Adult versus Child Learning

Gerry and I often discuss whether or not learning languages is easier for children than for adults. He is convinced there is no difference, I am not so sure. He claims it is purely a matter of time spent; I believe that the amount of 'stuff' already in the brain has some bearing. I am convinced, for example, that it is harder for me to learn Russian precisely because it has to compete with the French, German, and Spanish that I already have stored away. Learning a language is such a mysterious process in some ways. For example, every so often when using one of my foreign languages, I will start a sentence in the foreign language knowing that there is a word in the sentence I don't remember. By some kind of magic process, however, at the moment in the sentence when that unknown word is needed it just kind of pops out of my mouth. It happened to me in Kiev. I hadn't used my Russian for decades and had definite problems dredging vocabulary from the hidden depths, but every so often this strange process would kick in and at just the right moment a word would pop into my head that I didn't know I knew. It also happened in Germany. I remember wanting to ask a stallholder at a fleamarket if she knew where I could buy bed linen. Only when I got to the point in the sentence where the word was needed did it pop into my head. Perhaps it is evidence that the information about Russian and German that I stored away haven't disappeared, they are just lying there waiting to be reactivated.