Good news

When we visited our friends at the psychoneurological ward in August, our friend Sveta had lost sight in both eyes. You can see her in this photo, in the yellow shirt.

Recently I heard that an operation to restore the vision in one of Sveta's eyes was successful, and she's up and about and watching tv. :) Praise the Lord!

Queuing

I was very amused that my automatic Russian-English dictionary correctly translated the title of this post when my mouse hovered over it. The dictionary is rather incomplete and sometime supplies the wrong contextual definition, or it recognizes only the lexical form and won't translate if word appears in a different form. It had no problem with "queuing," so I suppose the concept must be an important one in the Russian language.

While traveling in foreign countries, I can sometimes be quite good at blending in. But while I can skillfully hide certain American mannerisms, I’m not so willing to take on the customs of the new culture. There are certain Russian customs that I simply ignore and hope that no one will notice.

One of them is the “waiting in line” conversation. If anyone asks me, I try to be accommodating, but I refuse to initiate a discussion about who’s last in line. It’s just too strange. Here’s a typical dialogue:

“Who’s last in line here?”
“I am.”
“Then I’m after you.”

This is a perfectly normal conversation occurring in Russia. The question I have as a foreigner is, why on earth do they have to discuss it? Everyone knows that if you want to stand in line, you simply go to the end, stand behind the last person, and keep standing behind them until it’s your turn. If you step out of line early, because you forgot something, you go back to the end and begin again.

When we learned line etiquette in Russian class, we were all quite shocked. How could there be different sets of rules for standing in line? Isn't it common sense?

Russians use the waiting in line rules to deal with situations like this:let’s say that an elderly person comes in and doesn’t have the strength to stand in line. He/she initiates the “Who’s in line” conversation and then adds, “Tell everyone that I’m after you.” And goes to sit down. Now, another person enters and approaches the person who’s standing at the end of the line.

Person who’s physically last in line: “There’s a woman standing after me.” The elderly woman waves from a bench and the new arrival says, “Well then I’m after her.”

For some reason Russians like to get in line before they are finished shopping. Sometimes one person stands with the cart and one or more members of the party continue to run around the store collecting items. Other times one person stands in line without the cart and his companions bring the cart later.

Aside from saving a spot for their friends, Russians also ask strangers to save their place. Recently I was the last in line and a woman came up behind me. “Say that I’m after you,” she instructed. And left her eyeglasses in the basket behind me to “save” her spot while she ran off to get her groceries. It’s all about ensuring your special place and then getting others to work for you.

It’s the same concept on the bus with getting a seat. Elderly people rush on and hover over two seats at once. Indecisive? No, just saving a seat for their friend. When there isn’t enough of something, you take care of yourself and your own.

From the American point of view, it's immoral to break rules for the sake of your friends. From the Russian point of view, it's immoral to let down your friends for the sake of following the rules.

Friend-time

This is my friend Lida! People always mix up our names. :) Today we were using my computer to look for scientific articles for Lida's dissertation on determining proper glove sizes for women. Something like that. She was looking for information about technology like scanners that can gather a lot of sizing data quickly.

As you can see from the yellow leaves outside the window, fall is here. It's pretty much your typical fall, nothing out of the ordinary. I've been given a lot of apples from people's family gardens. They (the apples) are sour and good for baking. I'll have to make a pie or two. Or ten.

Language Acquisition #1-Alphabet and Phonetics

I’m starting a series on my observations of successes and mistakes when studying a foreign language.

Rule #1: There is always an exception to the rule!

I was going to start out by saying that learning the alphabet is the first step, but I realize that it’s not a complete piece of advice. What need to be addressed first are not only the individual letters, but the phonics, or building blocks of a language.

Now if you’re learning English, I don’t know if any of this advice is actually going to help you. I’m still learning how people learn English. I’m always impressed by non-native speakers who are fluent in English. I have many students come to me and say “I want to read in English. Please help me. Don’t you have any rules?” Sure, there are rules. “I before E, except after C, or when sounding like ei as in neighbor and weigh.” However, the long e represented by “ie” in “piece” can also be spelled e, ee, ea, i, and ei. In addition, the long a sound can be spelled ay, eigh, a, ai, or ea. So you’re stating a rule that compares two sounds that are not constant. When you add examples to clarify, you have to actually know the words that you’re using as examples. Do beginning readers know “neighbor” and “receive”? It comes down to memorizing multiple small groups of words. English has 1,100 different ways to spell its 44 separate sounds, more than any other language...Read more here from: Absolutely Ridiculous English Spelling!

Despite difficulties when a language has many sounds, I think the key to learning to read another language is learning how to read and represent the sounds in the context of that language, not in the context of your own language. If you define a sound as “like the English a in father,” you are probably not going to learn the pronunciation correctly.

I have a confession. I teach ESL, and I don’t know the international phonetic symbols, or whatever they’re called. Terrible, isn’t it? I don’t like reducing a language into phonetics symbols, nor into another language’s symbols. I do recognize that perhaps it is useful when you are plunged into another culture where you don’t have time to learn the alphabet and must make do with transliterated phrases. I’ll address this in my “survival phrases” segment in a later article. We used to come to Russia on short-term trips, and learned several Christian songs using transliteration. Now I realize how far from accurate our pronunciation was. But, we were singing the songs with native speakers who could sing correctly, and hopefully weren’t bothered by our mistakes.

When I was a freshman in university and taking Russian 102, I asked my friends to quiz me before tests. Not knowing Cyrillic, they had a tough time knowing if I was correct or not. Sometimes they could guess by the first letter or the length of the word.

So we sat there and my friend said “okay, the preposition meaning ‘in’ or ‘at.’”
I uttered a barely audible “ffff.”
“What?”
“Ffff. It looks like an English ‘B,’ but is actually V, but gets softened when mixed in with nouns that start with a consonant.”
“Ohhhh, okay.” But the fact is that it’s not an F or a V, it’s a Russian letter with its own sound, and you have to contort your face differently than when you speak English. Explaining in relative terms is useless.

When we’re writing down new words, my students often ask, “How do you spell it?” And I show them where they already wrote it in English. “But how do you spell it in Russian?” “You don’t, you spell it in English.” “But how do you say it?” I tell them how to pronounce it and they try to write it anyway in Cyrillic. I often encourage drawing a picture rather than writing the translation. Then we end up with creations like this:

So how do you learn the proper pronunciation of a word if you can’t write it down using your native language? Pronunciation needs to be memorized, and memorization comes with repetition…. preferably daily. Kids have good memories though, so they can get away with a few times a week. Living in the culture also helps, of course. You may hear too many words to remember them all, but you will hear the sounds, and that is the beginning.