Easy for Tolstoy, but not for me
Learning Russian isn't a snap. Oh, if he had only started sooner.
from the March 5, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Albina takes her job seriously; she keeps me at it, hour after hour, with a break for tea. She does not scold me for my bad pronunciation and poor grammar. She corrects me, but is not stern. She knows that American students expect cheerful encouragement, not annoyed shaming.
Even so, I am amazed when we spend 15 minutes one afternoon on my pronunciation of the Russian letter "x." The sound of it is touched here and there, corrected inside-outside, knocked a little to the left, further back to the right – now with even less "k" and more "h," then with smoother aspiration. I feel like the wrong substance for a sculptor. I won't or can't hold the shape I have been knocked into.
One day Albina tells me it's because I'm creative that I want to know why, for instance, the numbers 2, 3, and 4 are not plural in Russian grammar. I want to know why "to laugh" is reflexive but "to cry" is not.
I want to tell her it's not that I'm creative, it's that when I notice discrepancies in the few little things I do know, I feel frustrated because I realize, "Oh, no, there's something else I'm going to have to learn."
So when Albina says I'm a creative type and want to understand what I'm learning – when many students don't care about why, they just accept and learn the rules – I would like to protest. But I don't know how to say that I wish I was smart with languages and had that sticky substance those "accepting" people have that allows them to quickly pick up new words and grammar.
In my other lives as a professor and a father, I know – or pretend to know – what I'm talking about, but here I am unable to disguise my ignorance. Struggling with Russian, I keep thinking of my ESL students, in particular middle-aged Tatyana (I'm middle-aged, too), who, when she immigrated to the US and began studying English, suffered terrible humiliations at having to speak like a baby.
I speak like a baby in Russian. When, as a guest of my landlady, a teacher in St. Petersburg, I visit her school, the younger children are amazed at my ignorance. (An adult who can't speak Russian!) I say, answering a question about my own children back in New York City, "Schools ... my children ... good," not "My children's schools are good."
These Russian students pity me – and correct me. (Go anywhere else in the world and try to speak the language; the natives will smile and appreciate your effort. In Russia, you will be corrected from the dovetailed string of consonants right down to the feathered word endings!)
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