Why Russian Native Speakers Can't Teach Russian

Dear Students,

The native speaker is revered as the genuine article, the real thing, the ne plus ultra. Well, I hate to say it, but, as my gruff-speaking neighbor would say in his bad French, I’d like to give that false truism the coup de gras.

There is no one more helpless in the classroom than a Russian teaching Russian who is ignorant of language. I had the old mid-century battle-axes in college, who’d say: “Why you not know dis word? You learn it, you hear?” And I had a charming nymph, a госпожа Данилева, whose name I will never forget, who moved with soundless grace, spoke Russian in a murmurous fluted lilt, was so afraid of the old bastard who ran the program and so unsure of herself that she never taught anything and we learned nothing, except that young Russian women can be unspeakably beautiful.

But then I had доктор Арутунова at Harvard and she broke the mold. Brilliant, linguistically erudite, endlessly mindful of her role as trainer of the young Russian language professors of the coming age in America, superb and frightening, she was the very best there was. Our class met only once a week (for two hours), and it was so nerve-wracking that one lived in terror until the day of class, enjoyed a day or two of relaxation and then lived five days of terror until the next class. She knew everything Jakobson and Halle and Chomsky were working on and she got us to talk about it in Russian. У Гоголя мы видим реализацию метафоры. Вот различительные признаки русской фонологи... It got even harder when we got deeper into other Slavic languages. My colleague was stopped by Arutunova on the street — she made some remark or some question — and he responded: Прочь? which in Czech means ‘why’, but in Russian, ‘get away’. Oh my lord.

But how we learned Russian syntax: какие бы книги вы ни читали, вы... окажись я на месте преступления... and many many more beauties of Russian irrealia.

The fact is that everybody of every ethnic group speaks some language and has strong opinions about that language, even if he has never been trained in languages. This often leads to wrong-headed conceptions and to real misinformation if a classroom teacher is an ignorant native speaker; and, let me tell you, there is no more arrogant a native speaker than an ignorant Russian, one who cannot for the life of him assume the proper humility of respect and awe needed to teach a language. Especially a language of world literature, especially a language of world wisdom and suffering and poetry. Especially the language of Putin and Prokof’ev, of Khrushchev and Shchedrin, of Kharms and Khachaturian.
Why? Why? The answer is coming in the next installment, but, for a clue, read Henry James” “The Real Thing” to learn why the real thing is not it, after all.

gmc