Дорогой русский язык...

Dear Russian Language,

You are a strange and tortuous mistress.  Every time I begin to think that perhaps we are getting along, you spurn me.   You torture me by giving me false hope, believing that maybe our relationship will blossom into something wonderful, and then you send me reeling with your harsh lack of vowels and impossible conjugations. 

Time after time I fall for you, I am fooled into thinking we have a future together,  lulled by your sweet beauty and soft words...and time after time you suddenly turn on me, leaving me heartbroken and frustrated by my own naivety.  

Some days I feel there is hope that I will finally conquer you, and then all is ripped out from underneath me, the basic foundations I thought I knew, gone...

It would be for my own good to just walk away. You're bad for my health.  But I never shall.  Will the torture ever end? I think not.

 

Lovingly, pathetically yours,

Bimini...

 

Soooo, that may have been a little melodramatic, but I think it captures at least to some extent the torture of learning a slavic language, while trying to reflect the drama of Russia itself -a cold, beautiful, but harsh country.

I've been here over 3 months now, and there is no doubt about it, my russian has improved dramatically.  When I first got here I accidentally told someone that my day was "not milk" instead of "not bad", whereas now I can kind of hold a conversation.  Kind of.

But I still have a long way to go.  The language shouldn't be as hard as it is.  It's really quite logical, and looking at it objectively I remind myself that it shouldn't be difficult at all.  You don't have to worry about stupid things like word order -everything is easily marked and identified by it's case ending, which tells you everything you need to know about the sentence.  It's certainly an easier language than English. I'm so glad English is my first language...learning other languages just highlights to me how stupid english is, and I'm glad I don't have to learn it as a second language...

But I can't help but shake the feeling that if I'd been studying something like French these last 3 years, instead of Russian, I'd be practically fluent in French by now.   It was quite depressing when I spent some time with some french students, and realised that my French is just as good as (if not slightly better) than my Russian...after being in Russia for three months!

I heard a statistic though (not sure how true it is), that Asian/slavic languages take 3 times as long to become fluent in, as the romantic languages.  This is somewhat comforting, but at the same time raises the question; "why the hell did I choose to study Russian?!"

I'd just like to point out a few of the challenges in learning this language...

Obviously there's learning a new alphabet.  Now, that's not actually such a big deal.  It's not as hard as some people make it

out to be.  But if you're having an off day, the alphabet can really come back to bite you in the bum.

The "v" sound is represented by a "B".

The "nn" sound is represented by a "H".

The "hh" sound is represented by  "x".

Let's not forget that the "rr" sound is written with a "p",

and that the "pp" sound is represented by "п" (that one actually makes sense). But when the "п" is handwritten in cursive (because all Russians write in cursive), it can kind of look like an english language "n", which really messes with my head sometimes. The letter "я", which LOOKS like an english letter R turned backwards, is really pronounced "ya".

Speaking of backwards letters, the sound "eee" is written with "и", a backwards N.

There is a letter that looks like the starship enterprise.

ю <- see it? This letter is pronounced "yoo".

And this little cutie here is the bane of my existence. I always forget it in my spelling... It's one of those silent/soft sign letters that doesn't really have it's own sound.

ь... Looks like a "b" doesn't it? Nope. Not a b. It's called "Myakee znak".

Oh, and the "d" sound is represented by "д", a letter which can look like a captial A on billboards, or like a "b" when written in cursive.

Such a fun language.

But for all my complaints, I do really enjoy it. I like that I can almost understand radio announcements now, or at least tell where one word begins and the other one ends. I can read billboards, and it doesn't take me 10 minutes to read the side of a bus and figure out where it's going to. But I just wish that my performance was more steady... that is, I either have days of complete and total BRILLIANCE with the language, or I have days where I suck so badly I could make a fortune getting dirt out of carpets.

For example, just the other day, I had just finished telling a story in class. I was so proud of myself, as I'd done very well... Obviously there were a few mistakes, but I'd managed to correctly conjugate my verbs, and use appropriate forms of adjectives etc, without really thinking about it. It was quite an achievement for me. Then, about 10 minutes later I completely screwed up the answer to a very simple question about what I had for breakfast. It's a roller-coaster of ups and downs.

Anyway, I only have three weeks left, so I'm stocking up on books etc, so hopefully I won't lose too much of my speaking abilities over the summer. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, here is a video I made to represent my love/hate relationship with the language...

Blogspot.com seems to cut the video off, so it's not as effective.  You can either watch the cut off, not-as-good clip below, or you can click THIS link and see it properly on facebook.

Loves...