Sochi, October 2021
The following post is a dialogue between diary entries written during my year abroad in Saint Petersburg and reflections on my language journey written whilst I was working in Kiev after graduating from university. Now I sit in Sochi, Russia, once again reflecting on my Russian journey over the past 6 years, and I appreciate how far I have come to be able to have done a job interview in Russian and be communicating solely in Russian with my boss and her other staff. I hope these anecdotes reassure people who are studying any language or know the particular challenges of Russian and that this encourages them to keep striving!
Saint Petersburg, February 2018
I’m coming to terms with the overwhelming realisation that Russian is actually a REALLY hard language and I need to not let it bother me that I’ll probably never be fluent like I will in French or Spanish.
Kiev, October 2019
Looking back on the me who wrote that desperate sentence makes me laugh, not because it isn't true but because I had no idea how little I knew then about the challenge of mastering Russian that still lay ahead. That said, I can't believe I was convinced I would never improve - what a silly girl!! Sitting in a coffee shop in the trendy Podil district of Kiev having had over two months in the city, how is it that I know I have improved but at the same time I STILL feel the way I felt on 25th February almost two years ago? Because that is exactly what learning a language is and will always be. You will never ever know enough words because you will always come across one that stops you in your sentence-making tracks. This is the joyous challenge of language-learning. The sooner you accept this and just embrace it, the better.
Saint Petersburg, March 2018
I'm still struggling through my classes, not understanding most of my teachers while they try and explain the daily tasks and homework to me but we somehow get there in the end. On Friday I squinted at the whiteboard covered in a swirly muddle of cursive, apparently asking us to write a letter to the Dean of our faculty asking for academic leave to pursue specialist interests in another subject area. I misunderstood this and interpreted the few words I could decipher into a rather different letter asking the Dean if I could have a holiday from lectures because I was feeling ill and I would be back again next week prepared to work a lot harder. My teacher came over to read it and tutted and huffed and puffed and said "nyet, Lara, nyet. Ochen ploha" which translates as "No, Lara, no. Very bad" and aggressively crossed it all out. Rather hurt, I asked the person next to me to re-explain the task and I drafted a better second attempt.
Kiev, October 2019
Scarring experiences like these might put some people off learning a language all together. Or they spur you on. If it's the former, refer to the second paragraph of this entry. If it's the latter, you will conquer the language! Sometimes it's demoralising, but if you love the language you are learning and relish the challenge then you will absorb the criticism and use it as a lesson, albeit an aggressive one. At the end of the day you are in the classroom to be taught, not to be right, so just get it wrong until you don't anymore!! When I redid the task having understood the question I was praised. Basically, don't sulk in a corner if you don't understand. Ask questions and keep asking them until you are satisfied you know what's going on. It's surprising how many people have more patience in the real world than some teachers have in a classroom.
Saint Petersburg, March 2018
"At 8:30 I got a latte from Surf Coffee on my street and went to uni feeling rather vacant. My teacher went through the short story we had to read for homework (it took me years and I basically ended up fully translating it to understand it) and then lo and behold as if Monday wasn't already a struggle, the second half of the lesson was taken by a trainee teacher. A Chinese trainee teacher. I could barely understand her accent and it was agonising when she asked us to participate because of the 4 of us that had turned up we had the collective enthusiasm of a toothpick. I sat through the unbearable pain wishing I could be anywhere else getting my kneecaps smashed in with a sledgehammer or something but alas I have not mastered the art of teleporting yet. My teacher saw me huffing and puffing and laughed and made motions with her arms at me to breathe in and out and join in but I just got stressed and flustered and mouthed to her that I couldn't understand anything. After the lesson finally came to an end, with a fried brain I tried to do some work and failed. In a stroppy state I got the bus home and found that none of my flatmates had gone to uni and I wish I'd done the same. We all decided to go to the Green Room Café in Etagi to get brain food and do some work. I managed to be semi-productive but still felt quite dodgy and not even a cheeky glass of red helped so I knew it was serious. I face timed Zof and Elsie which really cheered me up and then I cooked chilli con carne because comfort food remedies a multitude of ills, even Mondays."
Kiev, October 2019
Some days you're not in the right mindset, and that's ok! This is easy advice to give but nearly impossible to take (for me anyway) because when you are demotivated everything feels so much harder and hope feels lost in a great abyss of despair. If you find yourself in this pit of despair, stop everything you are doing and have a break. It sounds obvious but I don't mean sit at your desk, scroll through facebook and come back to it. I mean walk away from the desk, leave the house, go for a walk, talk to another human being, listen to a podcast, do some yoga, do anything else that you know will make you feel better for the rest of the day rather than a short term fix like chocolate in front of the TV. When you look back on what you did instead of some language learning, don't let it be a guilty pleasure that with hindsight makes you feel worse about your ability to be productive. It can be hard to tear yourself away from working but you know deep down you aren't really achieving anything by sitting there stewing over it so love yourself and come back to it when you're ready. You are your toughest critic and you're better than you think. You haven't given up yet - don't start now!
Saint Petersburg, April 2018
"I got my grammar test back and hadn't failed as miserably as I expected but still made an abundance of errors I shouldn't have."
Kiev, October 2019
WRONG!!! Of course I should have made those errors, without those errors I would have learnt nothing! Even as native speakers of our birth language we have mind blanks so when you are speaking another language, of course you will get stuck all the time. I've learnt the hard way in Kiev, that if you sit silently reading and listening to Russian, this can only help you so much and you absolutely can't sit around waiting for the day to come that you open your mouth a flawless Russian comes out because that day does not exist. The oldest trick in the book is to improve by making as many appalling mistakes as possible and remember the situation you were corrected in so that your memory has a vivid context to refer to the next time you need to use a certain word. For example, a Russian colleague of mine, asked where I got my earrings from and I said they were given to me as an order rather than a gift because the I got the words mixed up. Her bemusement and warm chuckle when she realised what I meant have lingered in my memory ever since and I have stopped me from making the mistake again.
If you are looking to take courses in Russia and don't know which schools to go to, read on...
1. Liden and Denz - https://lidenz.ru/
This is a private school designed specifically for language courses for foreigners. They have schools in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Irkutsk and Riga. I studied in the Saint Petersburg school for a 2-week short course with a lovely teacher called Georgy and obtained my A2+ certificate. The classrooms are modern, they provide textbooks and it is located very centrally. I chose to book accommodation through them and lived with two students also doing Russian courses. The school can arrange homestays for you with Russian families too. They also organise tourist trips to sites in St P which is useful if you're feeling a bit daunted by the idea of navigating the city alone.
2. University Saint Petersburg State Uni - http://english.spbu.ru/education/russian-language
I studied here for my year abroad as part of an exchange programme and found the teaching style to be less modern but the teachers were all very friendly and motivating. There was a strictly no English rule (mainly because lots of them don't speak it) so I would suggest that total beginners do a course with a school like Liden & Denz first so that this kind of course isn't too intimidating.
3. Another one worth looking into is Herzen University, I never went but heard good reviews...