Dear Students,

Today is August 19, Wednesday and the opening of the semester is around the corner.
Unfortunately I note that the registrar hasn't posted our meeting rooms — in fact most SLA courses (School of Liberal Arts -- that's languages, philosophy, music, art, English, sociology, history) aren't listed yet.

I hope we can get a smart classroom for both 101 and 203, as visual modules are important to our work. 101 has a charming video that I find very useful.

For 203 and for later in 101 I recommend the podcasts "Taste of Russian," (say that with a thick Russian accent!) They have some refreshingly slangy and up-to-date podcasts on contemporary subjects, with full text available on their site. The designers are two men around thirty, I would guess, who are fully post-Soviet in their education, both with excellent senses of humor (чувство юмора) who have come up with coherent, tangy dialogue. I have always hated "conversation lessons" — Chomsky has some amusing remarks on that score — but these, for the most part, are good.

Try to get a Russian bilingual dictionary, perhaps the Oxford R-E and E-R in one small volume. It has a surprising amount of morphological information. I recommend Ожегов: Толковый словарь русского языка for investigating basic word usage, idioms, and verbal valence. Both are available at ruskniga.com (Brooklyn).

Chomsky on conversational lessons for foreign language students: one man worked like a beast learning "doing shopping" in German, all sorts of produce vocabulary and the like, numerals of course, syntax of questions (Wo ist Brot, bitte?). Proudly setting foot for the first time in a German store, he was confronted by another customer, who asked him, "Pardon me, sir, I've forgotten my glasses at home. Might you please read the label on this can for me?" The poor fool couldn't understand a word said to him.

The moral of the story I leave for you to find.

The word for Russian is, as you know "russkee" or русский. It comes from the name of the old East Slavic area, Русь, which makes a derived relational adjective by adding -ский. Русьский > русский. It denotes Russian as an ethnic group and as a language.

Best of luck in settling into New Orleans and Tulane.
gmc