Living with a Foreign Language

Or: You thought you could speak the lingo.
How many of you actually speak another language, apart from your mother tongue? Okay, that chap from Finland, put your hand down. And you too, brother of mine; three years of high school French and one of German do not make you fluent in a foreign language. And anybody counting computer languages, just try and order a cup of coffee with one, or ask about the weather.
Before I got here, I thought I was reasonably fluent in Russian. Actually, I thought I was passably okay, capable of being understood if I spoke clearly, but not fluent, not really. I was wrong, wrong, wrong!!! Russian is a bit harder to master than French or German. For a start, there are six noun cases. (Yes, Finnish has 14 cases, but no prepositions.) It is one of the harder Indo-European languages for English speakers to learn.
Let’s start off with those noun cases. Anybody with a nodding acquaintance of grammar knows about subject and object, or direct and indirect object. English, to quote Blackadder, is an uninflected Indo-European language. We determine subject, object, and indirect object by word order and the occasional preposition – sort of like French. Russian does it by changing the ending of the words. This carries over into the plurals, so there are at least 12 endings to memorise. But wait, there’s more. Russian has three genders (yep, gender – words have gender; humans have sex) which starts to multiply the endings. Plus, there are groups of nouns within each gender that end differently in the base form (nominative singular, to be technical) and they decline slightly differently to the parent group. And then there are the old forms, specials and other irregulars. This carries over to adjectives too, which agree with the noun in gender, case and number. This I can cope with. Time for vodka.
Verbs are just as fun. I know, my idea of fun is not what yours is. English verbs display two forms, perfect and imperfect, or result and progress. Russian verbs do much the same, but the verb either changes from one conjugation (verbs conjugate) to another, or adds a prefix. Or rare occasions it will do both. And there is no present tense version of the verb “to be”. This I can cope with. Apply vodka.
There are a few other vagaries of the language which are testing, such as odd (to Anglo eyes) consonant clusters at the beginning of words – dn-, mn-, vkl- (these exist, I’m not making this up) and all those consonants are pronounced. Of course, prepositions, like “of” and “by”, exist and alter a nouns case. Some can give a choice of two cases, depending on the meaning of the preposition, and what is really being meant. Again, this I can cope with. Apply vodka.
What I find difficult is having my brain wake up in English every morning and slowly accept that it is listening to Russian. Half-heard snatches of TV are bashed to sound English. I have to think when I speak to Galina, first thing. Mercifully, I’ve only said “good morning” instead of “dobroe utro” (written доброе утро and pronounced dob-ree oo-tra) once, as far as I’m aware. Equally frustrating is forgetting a word and spending a couple of seconds trying to remember it. This really cuts the flow of a conversation, and is a bit depressing for the confidence. Or realising I’ve put a past tense verb into the wrong gender. Bit of nuisance suddenly realising you’ve given somebody a sex-change mid conversation.
This habit of thinking in the wrong language means that I often need to make two attempts at understanding people when they first speak to me, at any time of the day. It gets even worse if I’ve been speaking English, hanging out with Team America, writing my blog, anything where the auto-reflex is English. And this applies to numbers too. I’m quite happy reading large chunks of Russian, but suddenly hit a number and the brain switches back to the mother tongue. Everybody I’ve asked seems to have this problem – doesn’t matter what degree of fluency people have, for a long time numbers go to native tongue first.
This tendency to push words towards the primary language means that sports’ chants, for example, can become something entirely new. At the hockey game, for a long time us Anglos thought the home fans were shouting “Ak Bars, we will buy them” or variations on this (in a Chinese whispers sort of way). What was being shouted was “Ak Bars, viigraem” (pronounce each vowel separately), which translates as “Ak bars, we will win”.
So I try and get as much listening practice in as I can, to force the brain into thinking Russian. “Hah, has to start thinking first,” I can hear some of you say. Listening practice involves Russian TV, listening to shop musak, not ignoring the conversations of passers-by, that sort of thing. Of course, it all comes to a crashing halt when they’re speaking Tatar. Aargh. Time for more vodka.
Next Post: Too many pockets!