Advancing

The other day I was in the orphanage helping kids with English, when suddenly a girl needed help with her Science homework. The teacher sent her over to read it aloud to me. I was like, ummm, did she forget I'm not a native speaker?

So Vika came over with her book about "The World Around Us" and started to read to me a text on mushrooms. Surprisingly, I understood every word! We memorized the names of six mushrooms in Russian, three edible and three non-edible. We also memorized guidelines on how to pick mushrooms and learned the three parts of the mushroom and the role of mushrooms in the environment. I'm pretty sure American school curricula don't go into this amount of detail on mushrooms, although there was a mycologist living down the street from the house where I grew up.

So my Russian has now passed third grade. Pretty exciting!