Ways and Means to Study a Language

October 8

Dear Students,
How does one study a language? One has to decide what one wants to do with the language. Converse with the natives? Learn phrases for tourists? Really get some fluency (that’s Byron’s plan for Russian)? Get the basics, then be able to use the language for research, or for business purposes? Learn enough to really please one’s grandmother from Omsk? Be able to have control of the sounds of the language, like Christopher Wertz with Italian, in Inglorious Basterds? Have really good active control of the phonetics, like an opera singer must have German and Italian, but not necessarily a fluent speaking knowledge?

These are all very respectable goals and all, and with varying degrees of commitment of time, zeal, labor, and struggle, all are attainable. The easiest is the opera singer’s goal, but even that can be difficult if you don’t have the knack of imitation. Jessica Norman, a wonderful singer, never could sing German to my satisfaction, and her Southern accent in Mahler’s lieder is to my taste distracting. Remember when you are speaking Russian, to the end of our days, you are ‘imitating’ a native speaker; you have to consciously control your speech apparatus. Just as non-natives speaking English, who can pronounce the interdental fricative ‘th’ quite nicely — when they are concentrating, that is. A couple of drinks in their belly, and the fricative assimilates to their own native language, and so we hear ‘de house,’ ‘you bote [=both] are coming,’ and so on. You have to get an American really drunk before he loses that fricative, but that’s possible, too, because it is so functionally complex. In both cases we see a sort of aphasia, due to lack of concentration or a lowering of inhibition and neurological control

If you want to ‘get the basics’ and a touch of fluency first, you have to practice all the skills in your language classroom; they will stay with you in the future when you are using Russian in business correspondence or when chatting with clients. You may not have to do much writing, but you have to know conversational phrases and you have to remember how to read, which means basic vocabulary.

The technical vocabulary of your specialty is in the long run easy to get, since it’s usually a limited stock of words pertaining to what you study or what you do, and it doesn’t take very long to get a very good passive control of these words by reading books and articles. It is much harder to get a good ‘general’ vocabulary, that needed for reading novels or newspapers without a dictionary. It will come, with effort, and in time the dictionary will only be needed in critical cases when you’re not getting the point because you don’t get some term or other.

Of course, before you read geological articles in Russian every week, you want to get the fundamental morphology and vocabulary. That you will have after three good semesters of university Russian. At that point you can take a fork in the road and follow the yellow brick road of your own desires. If more fluency is your goal, a summer in Russia would be stupendous; the great advantage of traveling to the site of the target language, as Berenice will testify, is getting to know the people on their own sod, so to speak, and one can do it very nicely with three semesters preparation.

To pass a graduate language exam in Russian, you’ll need to spend a period of time reading in the field you will be tested in; if it is political science, you should read articles in Russian journals, and perhaps work with a Russian speaker or a professor who can help you be sure you are getting it right. If you are in mathematics, you’ll find the vocabulary and style of writing leans heavily on English. We once had an undergraduate, a math and Russian major, who decided to do a self-designed Junior Study Abroad Year, and he travelled to a remote northern city where they had a good math department — and where, as a bonus, there were very few people who spoke English. Our concern for him was not academic, but meterological: could he survive the bitter, cruel Russian winter? He did, and all went well.

I came to the decision last summer that I would turn the arc of second-year-Russian to careen toward Dostoevsky, where it will abut in a crescendo of Russian-only speaking, reading, and writing. There is no reason for us to patter on in the same vein an entire year; it’s time to get to the beef.

I hope there will be some of you left in 203 who have the adventurous spirit to try this (204). It will be very good stuff. (Meets three times a week, not four.)

gmc