Heather Worley Living in St. Petersburg, Russia

I'm trying to decide if I walk like I know where I'm going, or if St.-Petersburgers really just get lost in their city that much.  Almost every day someone stops me on the street to ask directions.  But as soon as they notice my accent, or my hideous grammar, they immediately discount what I say.
 
The language thing is sorta frustrating.  Russian is hard.  When I tell people that, the usual response is, "Yeah, that's right, you have to learn a completely different alphabet, don't you?"  Well, yes, but that takes less than a week, even if you're a bad student.  The grammar is the hard part.  Russian has case - six of them, in fact.  So, for every single noun in the language, there are twelve different endings to learn.  For example: student (which means, thankfully, student).  Ya student.  (I am a student.)  Ya lyublyu studenta.  (I love the student.)  U studenta est uchebnik.  (The student has a textbook.)  Ya pozvonyu studenty.  (I call the student.)  My s studentom gulyaem.  (I'm walking with the student.)  My govorim o studente.  (We're talking about the student.)  Then, to make them all plural, there is also studenty, studentov, studentov, studentam, studentami, studentakh.  To make it worse, there are three categories of nouns, each with a different paradigm (set of endings).  And you have to do this not only for every single noun in Russian, but also for every single pronoun and adjective, which have different endings, but which have to match the nouns.  And that's just nouns.  There are still verbs to think about...
 
Of course, when I say Russian's hard, I really only mean that it's a lot harder than Spanish.  It's not as hard as, say, Chinese, or English.  Russian has a lot of rules to remember, but there are far fewer exceptions than in English.  Rules are hard, but exceptions are harder.  So I will not be fluent by the time I return to America, but I already speak Russian a lot better than I did three and a half months ago, and my listening skills have improved even more.  Even on days when I make absolutely no effort to learn anything, I'm exposed to hundreds of times more Russian than I could be on an average day in the Russian program at OU. 
 
But most days I actually make a lot of effort.  Everywhere I go I carry around a notebook that Lauren gave me, and I write down a lot of new words and phrases, especially if it's something I hear over and over, and I look them up in my massive Oxford dictionary.  I aim for around 10-15 per day, but usually end up with a lot more.  There are times it makes my head hurt just to try to remember all these words, and which case(s) of noun they require(!), but the notebook also has a huge emotional advantage: it's a record of progress.  I looked back at the beginning of the notebook the other day to see how many of the words I'd learned in September I'd retained, and it was almost all of them!  I consider my notebook essential to my sanity.  Some of the other students are frustrated because at times they feel like they're not learning anything, but I honestly never feel that way, although sometimes I feel like I'm not learning very much that's useful.  For instance, in my history class we learned about five words all meaning "to attack" (as in, make war against) before I ever learned the word for "to fight" (fistfight).  And really, which is more useful in conversation?
 
Trying to translate my thoughts into Russian in order to have a conversation is sometimes difficult.  English has a lot of phrases that don't really mean anything when you break them apart, so they can even be difficult to find in a dictionary.  And we use fewer than ten verbs to accomplish almost everything we need to say, the most important being: take, get, have, do, be, and make. But they don't translate well, so I have to rephrase English in my head to figure out what I want to say in Russian.  For instance, when I to talk about when I got up, I can't say the Russian words for "get" and "up."  It wouldn't make sense.  I have to say, "Vstayu."  (I rise.)  But these aren't the sort of things that occur to an English speaker.  If someone asked me, "What's another way to say get up?" I would probably say, "Wake up," which also has a meaningless "up" at the end, but at least could be found in a dictionary.  Other "get" phrases to illustrate: get mad (become), get a magazine (subscribe), get groceries (buy, acquire), get the phone (answer), get my slippers (fetch), get out (leave), get it (understand)? 
 
Colloquialisms are also difficult.  Sometimes the only way to express myself is to learn the equivalent in Russian.  There really just isn't a non-colloquial word that means "cool," and that's a word every college student uses a lot. 
 
One of the funnier things is the words that sound like English words and actually mean the same thing, like: interesting (interesno), intrigovat' (intrigue), flirtovat' (flirt), vindserfing (wind-surfing), privilegiya (privilege).  Sometimes it's helpful, but sometimes it sounds just enough different that it just doesn't occur to me that it's the same thing.  Adrianne had such an incident with the word "wind-surfing."  She just thought vindserfing was a weird word, and spent an hour repeating it to herself, trying to figure out what the roots in it were, while everyone around her just laughed.  And to make it worse, a lot of people here know English, so at times they throw English words into Russian sentences in an attempt to be helpful, but it's just confusing, because I don't catch on that that's what they're doing, and since they say it with a Russian accent, it's completely unrecognizable and I think it's just a weird Russian word I've never heard before.
 
Of course, then there are all the funny borrowings: super, minimarket, reality show, internet cafe/club, wow, skinhead, feierverk (fireworks), punk, gay, stop, hot-dog, striptease, notebook (laptop), sex shop (actually written in English, never in Cyrillic)...
 
I've also realized how gruesome English nursery rhymes are.  My host father asked me to teach him an English lullaby, and he liked Rock-A-Bye Baby until I translated it for him.  Same thing when I tried to teach Mother Goose rhymes to my host mom to teach to her 2-year-old student of English (I'm not kidding).  Why are the mice blind?  Why does the woman want to cut their tails off?  What kid wants to sing about bridges falling and women living in shoes who can't feed their children?  I think there's something wrong with our culture.  Russian nursery rhymes are generally pretty happy.
 
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I've decided about my Christmas break plans.  In late January, I'm going to go see Scott for two weeks in Madrid.  I even have an airline reservation.  More details later.
 
I hope everything's going well for everyone back home.  I'm still taking questions, comments, and complaints.
 
All the best -
Heather:)**************************************************************

Men'she znaesh', luchshe spish'. The less you know, the better you sleep.

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