Hello Faithful readers,
uh, let's just dive right in ...
The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the culture
As you all know, or maybe you don't, in addition to teaching english, I was coming here with the intention of learning some language skills of my own. Of course, it's quite useful, especially if you want to buy anything or talk to anyone, but I also like the feeling of learning a new way to communicate. It can also help you understand the way people think as it has been postulated that the way we speak is related to the way we think. (Shrug) Maybe. Anyway, when I arrived here, I was only able to say a few words, but lately I have had a lot of opportunity to practice and things are starting to stick in my head little better now than they did before. I'd sure like to be able to spend more time practicing, but even so, I am pretty proud to say that my spanish is coming along nicely! No, really. Read on.
Mixed messages
In my last post I mentioned that I had an interesting gathering in my new apartment (Ha, you thought I forgot about that when actually, it ties right in). Here's the story. My friend Vera, who speaks english and spanish, as well as russian, has been inviting me to various places when she can. I went to a cool party for a friend of hers names Daria who just completed her doctorate in linguistics. She speaks many languages (including spanish) and can read sanscrit (she tells me the sanscrit version of Harry Potter is lame because the sanscrit phrase for "he who must not be named" is about 2 pages long so the book just becomes to large and unwieldy to read).
Anyway, Vera and Daria invited me to meet them and some of their friends in a cafe. What the hell, I said, it sounds cooler than writing a blog entry. The other friends included Eduard and Dennis, brothers who have a cuban father and russian mother so that they both speak spanish but Eduard was raised here so he speaks russian, while Dennis just moved here recently but does speak some english. Also there was Cristina, who is Spanish but has been living and teaching here for 5 years so she speaks russian but understand a fair amount of portuguese (helpful to me) and even some english. Last but not least were Lyuba and her husband Raman who both only speak russian with smatterings of english (actually, it would later turn out that Lyuba understands quite a bit of english but is mostly too shy to speak).
If you have been counting, that's 8 people, 6 speak russian (excepting me and Dennis), 4 speak spanish, 3 speak english, 2 speak some portuguese, and 1 reads sanscrit. Do the math. The second most used language was spanish. I don't really speak spanish, but I know some from trying to learn it long ago.
Vera and Daria were working to help everyone communicate, but I didn't like to make them work all the time (it was a social occasion after all). So I tried to communicate with Lyuba and Raman in my russian and their english (about a 500 word shared vocabulary - actually amazing what can be conveyed within that limitation) and with Dennis, Eduard and Cristina in spanish. I totally failed to talk to the guys because they have a cuban accent and I literally couldn't follow it at all. We ended up using more english because Dennis knew more than he admitted (a common theme). Speaking with Cristina was the funniest (in a ha ha kind of way) because when I try to speak spanish, I actually speak more portuguese, which only works if, you know, the listener actually understands portuguese. Turns out that she is from a part of spain that is north west where the dialect is even closer to portuguese than normal spanish and is also close to the northern border with Portugal so she understands quite a bit of portuguese. Also, she is a spanish teacher, so she is used to people mangling her language and also used to speaking clearly to us. To add to the confusion, the brain is a funny thing and sometimes mine would come up with the russian word for something I was trying to say. The result is that more than once I started a sentence in spanish, took a short detour though russian, found my way to portuguese, and finally resorted to english to get to the period at the end. That's not what was amazing. What was amazing was that this mish mash was intelligible to her more often than not.
Oops, I forgot to mention, my brain has some high school french still stuck in there somewhere and all these latin languages are obviously stored near each other in my brain. Cristina happens to be studying french at the moment so occasionally we resorted to that as well, although I don't remember any 5 language phrases at the moment. Actually I'm pretty proud of how well I managed to communicate considering I only speak one of those languages well (if you're reading this, and wondering exactly wish language that is, I don't blame you)
In these situations a phone with internet access so you can get to google translate is extremely helpful, and of course all of had Vera and Daria to help if we really got stuck. Fun fact: Daria is a pretty common name here in Russia, and the nick name for Daria is Dasha - yes, it saves one easy syllable and no letters - and that's only if you consider the dupthong 'ia' to be 2 syllables.
The upshot was that the next weekend, I invited everyone over to my new apartment to recreate the fun (and get a lot of free food). Now I have this strange international band of friends and I can't seem to learn any russian.
Oh, by the way ...
A meteor hit this country recently (I didn't even hear it). More about that next time ...
uh, let's just dive right in ...
The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the culture
As you all know, or maybe you don't, in addition to teaching english, I was coming here with the intention of learning some language skills of my own. Of course, it's quite useful, especially if you want to buy anything or talk to anyone, but I also like the feeling of learning a new way to communicate. It can also help you understand the way people think as it has been postulated that the way we speak is related to the way we think. (Shrug) Maybe. Anyway, when I arrived here, I was only able to say a few words, but lately I have had a lot of opportunity to practice and things are starting to stick in my head little better now than they did before. I'd sure like to be able to spend more time practicing, but even so, I am pretty proud to say that my spanish is coming along nicely! No, really. Read on.
Mixed messages
In my last post I mentioned that I had an interesting gathering in my new apartment (Ha, you thought I forgot about that when actually, it ties right in). Here's the story. My friend Vera, who speaks english and spanish, as well as russian, has been inviting me to various places when she can. I went to a cool party for a friend of hers names Daria who just completed her doctorate in linguistics. She speaks many languages (including spanish) and can read sanscrit (she tells me the sanscrit version of Harry Potter is lame because the sanscrit phrase for "he who must not be named" is about 2 pages long so the book just becomes to large and unwieldy to read).
Anyway, Vera and Daria invited me to meet them and some of their friends in a cafe. What the hell, I said, it sounds cooler than writing a blog entry. The other friends included Eduard and Dennis, brothers who have a cuban father and russian mother so that they both speak spanish but Eduard was raised here so he speaks russian, while Dennis just moved here recently but does speak some english. Also there was Cristina, who is Spanish but has been living and teaching here for 5 years so she speaks russian but understand a fair amount of portuguese (helpful to me) and even some english. Last but not least were Lyuba and her husband Raman who both only speak russian with smatterings of english (actually, it would later turn out that Lyuba understands quite a bit of english but is mostly too shy to speak).
If you have been counting, that's 8 people, 6 speak russian (excepting me and Dennis), 4 speak spanish, 3 speak english, 2 speak some portuguese, and 1 reads sanscrit. Do the math. The second most used language was spanish. I don't really speak spanish, but I know some from trying to learn it long ago.
Vera and Daria were working to help everyone communicate, but I didn't like to make them work all the time (it was a social occasion after all). So I tried to communicate with Lyuba and Raman in my russian and their english (about a 500 word shared vocabulary - actually amazing what can be conveyed within that limitation) and with Dennis, Eduard and Cristina in spanish. I totally failed to talk to the guys because they have a cuban accent and I literally couldn't follow it at all. We ended up using more english because Dennis knew more than he admitted (a common theme). Speaking with Cristina was the funniest (in a ha ha kind of way) because when I try to speak spanish, I actually speak more portuguese, which only works if, you know, the listener actually understands portuguese. Turns out that she is from a part of spain that is north west where the dialect is even closer to portuguese than normal spanish and is also close to the northern border with Portugal so she understands quite a bit of portuguese. Also, she is a spanish teacher, so she is used to people mangling her language and also used to speaking clearly to us. To add to the confusion, the brain is a funny thing and sometimes mine would come up with the russian word for something I was trying to say. The result is that more than once I started a sentence in spanish, took a short detour though russian, found my way to portuguese, and finally resorted to english to get to the period at the end. That's not what was amazing. What was amazing was that this mish mash was intelligible to her more often than not.
Oops, I forgot to mention, my brain has some high school french still stuck in there somewhere and all these latin languages are obviously stored near each other in my brain. Cristina happens to be studying french at the moment so occasionally we resorted to that as well, although I don't remember any 5 language phrases at the moment. Actually I'm pretty proud of how well I managed to communicate considering I only speak one of those languages well (if you're reading this, and wondering exactly wish language that is, I don't blame you)
In these situations a phone with internet access so you can get to google translate is extremely helpful, and of course all of had Vera and Daria to help if we really got stuck. Fun fact: Daria is a pretty common name here in Russia, and the nick name for Daria is Dasha - yes, it saves one easy syllable and no letters - and that's only if you consider the dupthong 'ia' to be 2 syllables.
The upshot was that the next weekend, I invited everyone over to my new apartment to recreate the fun (and get a lot of free food). Now I have this strange international band of friends and I can't seem to learn any russian.
Oh, by the way ...
A meteor hit this country recently (I didn't even hear it). More about that next time ...
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