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nenya_kanadka(Week 2 having been pre-empted by Porn Battle, I shall do it next week instead.)
Week of February 16, 2014:seascribe: Russian? You learned Russian, didn't you? Tell us what you liked about it? Or didn't like? Or teach us to swear? Or all of the above?
I did study Russian! Study being the operative word--I wouldn't say I've actually learned the language, since I've forgotten huge swathes of what I once knew, and I only got basic grammar and simple vocabulary as it was.
But I did indeed study Russian, a couple of times in fact. I initially started learning it when I was fourteen or fifteen because a group of Christian German-Russian immigrants who my parents were friendly with had moved in up the road from us. (By "up the road" I mean "a two hour drive away," but that's a whole story in itself. Northern British Columbia, man.) We also happened to have a really cool family friend who I had a massive crush on who was also studying Russian, so I got to bond with her over language study.
My first round of formal study was through a correspondence course where I did various exercises and listened to cassette tapes and then sent the week's work off to the one Russian speaker employed by the correspondence school...who lived 1500 km away in the city I live in now. :P So that was a three-week turnaround time to get my marks back. It was a whole new alphabet, too, and while I loved how organized all the cases and tenses seemed (until you got to irregulars! :P), it was a lot of work. Still, I enjoyed myself tremendously, and would attempt to write awkward notes in Russian to the Russian girls up the road with the few words I knew. I also had this book. It taught you grammar in a totally different order than my correspondence course did, which was super confusing to fifteen-year-old me. I didn't have a teacher to check my work with when I used that book, so I mailed things back and forth with Awesome Family Friend I Had A Gay Crush On. Who was so kind, and so smart, and so pretty...and so straight and so my mom's age. *woeful teenaged sigh*
There was also a young family from the Russian immigrant group who came to stay with us as a sort of English-immersion experience around that time. A little before I decided to officially study Russian, I think. They were in their early 30s and had a couple of kids and the dad was trying really hard to pick up English in his new country. (The mom, too, but she had less time because of the kids.) They were originally from Kazakhstan, and had lived in Germany for a few years before ending up in Canada. They were some kind of non-Orthodox Christian, Baptist I think, and had had troubles under the communists; I think Leo's dad had spent some time as a political prisoner, as had some of the other men in the group we knew. (Which made them a lot less trusting of the police even in Canada than my white Canadian family was.) They stayed with us for a few months and after they went back to their home up the road we'd go visit every so often. Sometimes we'd be invited for church on Sunday (and food! always food! lots of food in lots of little tiny dishes! eat up!). Their services were a lot different from ours, but some of the hymns were the same, which was cool (same tune, different language lyrics, easy to pick up). We had a tape of songs that Family Friend sent us that turned out to be ones Leo and Lena had known as kids, so they translated some of those for us too. I might still have the tape, if it didn't get lost in all my moving over the years.
My dad had studied Greek when he was in Jesuit seminary, so he was always pointing out the similarities between Greek and the Cyrillic script (which historically was created by Greek monks in the first place), and he was always very supportive of my Russian studies. My family has always been interested in different languages--my dad Greek and Latin from school, my mom French, both of them Japanese from a few years in Japan, etc. So sometimes we'd take something we each knew in the language we were studying (often a Bible passage) and compare them. It was really cool to see how different languages phrase the same basic ideas, and how it gave you new ways of viewing something you thought you already knew. And of course if I knew the passage in one language it was a lot easier to figure out what it meant in the other than if I was reading something cold. I suspect that the same would be true for any shared set of literature, or for a fandom.
I got to the point where I could write nearly intelligible simple letters, read the Psalms, stuff like that, but I was never very good at speaking, partly because I'm pretty deaf (those cassette tapes weren't much help :P) and partly because I didn't spend that much time with native Russian speakers...and when I did, they were madly trying to learn English! I am completely convinced that my accent is atrocious. These days if I come across a fanfic summary on AO3 in Russian, I can pick out the general gist of it most of the time. There are also enough similarities between various Slavic languages that if I find something in Ukrainian or Serbian or Polish, sometimes I can figure out a little bit it too. Of course nowadays there is also always Google translate, which didn't exist when I was fifteen. And which isn't always perfect, but sometimes I can tell when it's off. I dug up one of those hymns I knew (YouTube: Прихожу к Тебе я ("I Come To You")--please forgive the initial Jesus art) and ran it through there once, just to see what it would say. It translated the line "You are great" (as in "God is great") as "You are a bicycle." Apparently "velik" is a homonym meaning either "bicycle" (as a noun) or "great" (as a predicate adjective). So now I have to stop myself from intoning, "God's a bike! He's a beautiful bike!" when I hum that song to myself. :P
Anyway, I moved a couple of times, lost contact with that set of friends, and kind of wandered off from my Russian studies until I was in college. At that point I went back and took first-year college Russian. Which wasn't that different from what I'd studied in high school. I was having a hard time with most of my classes at that point but I still managed to pull a B+ with very little effort there, which was nice! I was taking that class when I signed up for Livejournal, and so when it looked like "Nenya" was taken, I went with "Nenya Kanadka", which means "Canadian Nenya." A while later I was in a roleplay group on LJ (back when we all used journals all the time) with a Russian-speaking fan. We did most of the RP in English, but occasionally I'd try out my Russian. She was playing Na'Toth from Babylon 5, and I was playing a human (Kasidy Yates from DS9), and the cool thing was that her English had enough Russian phrasings and stylistic quirks to it that it did sound a lot different from my English. Which kind of added some depth to the "we are playing cross-cultural contact" thing, because we actually were. (Her Na'Toth was also pretty awesome, and I was disappoint when I actually watched B5 and found out that she wasn't that major a character.)
So I guess Russian for me was more of a secret project than anything--a special language to talk to friends with more than something I've actually known well enough to use with strangers. I keep saying I'll go back to study more someday, but I don't know if I will. I really enjoyed learning the structure of the language--cases and tenses and how the basic form of a word gains various suffixes and prefixes depending on what part of speech it is. I think I would have found it more confusing if I hadn't had an English grammar teacher a few years before that who pounded all that stuff about my own language into my head. I did find that when I took French I found myself constructing sentences in my head that were half-French, half-Russian, because I'd spent so many years with Russian as "the foreign language" in my head that I'd jump immediately to that when I was told to do something not-English.
Unfortunately, I never actually learned to swear in Russian! The closest was that the dad of the family who stayed with us taught us how to say "yuck." Which, IIRC, is "byeka." Imagine this said by the four-year-olds in the family, passing new words back and forth and screwing up their faces in joy at a new way to say "yuck!"
:D
Week of February 16, 2014:
seascribe: Russian? You learned Russian, didn't you? Tell us what you liked about it? Or didn't like? Or teach us to swear? Or all of the above?I did study Russian! Study being the operative word--I wouldn't say I've actually learned the language, since I've forgotten huge swathes of what I once knew, and I only got basic grammar and simple vocabulary as it was.
But I did indeed study Russian, a couple of times in fact. I initially started learning it when I was fourteen or fifteen because a group of Christian German-Russian immigrants who my parents were friendly with had moved in up the road from us. (By "up the road" I mean "a two hour drive away," but that's a whole story in itself. Northern British Columbia, man.) We also happened to have a really cool family friend who I had a massive crush on who was also studying Russian, so I got to bond with her over language study.
My first round of formal study was through a correspondence course where I did various exercises and listened to cassette tapes and then sent the week's work off to the one Russian speaker employed by the correspondence school...who lived 1500 km away in the city I live in now. :P So that was a three-week turnaround time to get my marks back. It was a whole new alphabet, too, and while I loved how organized all the cases and tenses seemed (until you got to irregulars! :P), it was a lot of work. Still, I enjoyed myself tremendously, and would attempt to write awkward notes in Russian to the Russian girls up the road with the few words I knew. I also had this book. It taught you grammar in a totally different order than my correspondence course did, which was super confusing to fifteen-year-old me. I didn't have a teacher to check my work with when I used that book, so I mailed things back and forth with Awesome Family Friend I Had A Gay Crush On. Who was so kind, and so smart, and so pretty...and so straight and so my mom's age. *woeful teenaged sigh*
There was also a young family from the Russian immigrant group who came to stay with us as a sort of English-immersion experience around that time. A little before I decided to officially study Russian, I think. They were in their early 30s and had a couple of kids and the dad was trying really hard to pick up English in his new country. (The mom, too, but she had less time because of the kids.) They were originally from Kazakhstan, and had lived in Germany for a few years before ending up in Canada. They were some kind of non-Orthodox Christian, Baptist I think, and had had troubles under the communists; I think Leo's dad had spent some time as a political prisoner, as had some of the other men in the group we knew. (Which made them a lot less trusting of the police even in Canada than my white Canadian family was.) They stayed with us for a few months and after they went back to their home up the road we'd go visit every so often. Sometimes we'd be invited for church on Sunday (and food! always food! lots of food in lots of little tiny dishes! eat up!). Their services were a lot different from ours, but some of the hymns were the same, which was cool (same tune, different language lyrics, easy to pick up). We had a tape of songs that Family Friend sent us that turned out to be ones Leo and Lena had known as kids, so they translated some of those for us too. I might still have the tape, if it didn't get lost in all my moving over the years.
My dad had studied Greek when he was in Jesuit seminary, so he was always pointing out the similarities between Greek and the Cyrillic script (which historically was created by Greek monks in the first place), and he was always very supportive of my Russian studies. My family has always been interested in different languages--my dad Greek and Latin from school, my mom French, both of them Japanese from a few years in Japan, etc. So sometimes we'd take something we each knew in the language we were studying (often a Bible passage) and compare them. It was really cool to see how different languages phrase the same basic ideas, and how it gave you new ways of viewing something you thought you already knew. And of course if I knew the passage in one language it was a lot easier to figure out what it meant in the other than if I was reading something cold. I suspect that the same would be true for any shared set of literature, or for a fandom.
I got to the point where I could write nearly intelligible simple letters, read the Psalms, stuff like that, but I was never very good at speaking, partly because I'm pretty deaf (those cassette tapes weren't much help :P) and partly because I didn't spend that much time with native Russian speakers...and when I did, they were madly trying to learn English! I am completely convinced that my accent is atrocious. These days if I come across a fanfic summary on AO3 in Russian, I can pick out the general gist of it most of the time. There are also enough similarities between various Slavic languages that if I find something in Ukrainian or Serbian or Polish, sometimes I can figure out a little bit it too. Of course nowadays there is also always Google translate, which didn't exist when I was fifteen. And which isn't always perfect, but sometimes I can tell when it's off. I dug up one of those hymns I knew (YouTube: Прихожу к Тебе я ("I Come To You")--please forgive the initial Jesus art) and ran it through there once, just to see what it would say. It translated the line "You are great" (as in "God is great") as "You are a bicycle." Apparently "velik" is a homonym meaning either "bicycle" (as a noun) or "great" (as a predicate adjective). So now I have to stop myself from intoning, "God's a bike! He's a beautiful bike!" when I hum that song to myself. :P
Anyway, I moved a couple of times, lost contact with that set of friends, and kind of wandered off from my Russian studies until I was in college. At that point I went back and took first-year college Russian. Which wasn't that different from what I'd studied in high school. I was having a hard time with most of my classes at that point but I still managed to pull a B+ with very little effort there, which was nice! I was taking that class when I signed up for Livejournal, and so when it looked like "Nenya" was taken, I went with "Nenya Kanadka", which means "Canadian Nenya." A while later I was in a roleplay group on LJ (back when we all used journals all the time) with a Russian-speaking fan. We did most of the RP in English, but occasionally I'd try out my Russian. She was playing Na'Toth from Babylon 5, and I was playing a human (Kasidy Yates from DS9), and the cool thing was that her English had enough Russian phrasings and stylistic quirks to it that it did sound a lot different from my English. Which kind of added some depth to the "we are playing cross-cultural contact" thing, because we actually were. (Her Na'Toth was also pretty awesome, and I was disappoint when I actually watched B5 and found out that she wasn't that major a character.)
So I guess Russian for me was more of a secret project than anything--a special language to talk to friends with more than something I've actually known well enough to use with strangers. I keep saying I'll go back to study more someday, but I don't know if I will. I really enjoyed learning the structure of the language--cases and tenses and how the basic form of a word gains various suffixes and prefixes depending on what part of speech it is. I think I would have found it more confusing if I hadn't had an English grammar teacher a few years before that who pounded all that stuff about my own language into my head. I did find that when I took French I found myself constructing sentences in my head that were half-French, half-Russian, because I'd spent so many years with Russian as "the foreign language" in my head that I'd jump immediately to that when I was told to do something not-English.
Unfortunately, I never actually learned to swear in Russian! The closest was that the dad of the family who stayed with us taught us how to say "yuck." Which, IIRC, is "byeka." Imagine this said by the four-year-olds in the family, passing new words back and forth and screwing up their faces in joy at a new way to say "yuck!"
:D
no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 08:48 am (UTC)Я изучил русский язык! Я любил изучать и писать русский язык, но я был ужасен при разговоре. (translation of my horrible pidgin Russian, "I studied Russian language! I enjoyed studying and writing russian language, but I was terrible at speaking.")
Okay, back to the language that doesn't take me an hour of hunting and pecking around the keyboard to write a single sentence. I have only taken a semester of Russian language, and done a bit of study on my own since, but it's been enough to say "Hello" to the recently-Russian-immigrant moms at the playground (and to stealthily eavesdrop on typical momminess-conversations by same).
no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 09:20 am (UTC)I caught the first two parts of that, up to "ужасен при разговоре" where I had to skip to the translation. :D Я тоже любил изучать русский язык, и читать! А я не знал, что вы также изучил!
(Which I accomplished via translit.ru, and double-checking the grammar with translate.ru. Is that cheating? :D)
Yes! The moments when you actually realize you understood a thing outside of class are pretty cool. For me it's usually seeing a sign in a picture or a bit of dialogue in a story and going "Oh dude, that made actual sense."
If I had my choice of superpowers, it would be one of those that lets you learn ALL the languages really easily. Or at least the ones I've made a tiny start on. (And fly. I'd want to fly.)
(Also, fun fact: to be an astronaut you have to know Russian, because you work with cosmonauts. So I'm a thousandth of a percent closer that childhood dream. ;))
no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 02:41 pm (UTC)I know exactly what you mean about having that space in your head that's "foreign language" space, and having a hard time getting anything to work outside of your primary foreign language--I went to a couple of my ma's ASL classes, where I couldn't understand ANYTHING and could only do super basic single signs and fingerspelling, and my brain kept trying to break into French.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-02 05:44 am (UTC)Oh, good, it's not just me then with the "not-English" brain category. And man, ASL...Mucca took some classes and what little bits I managed to pick up were so cool when I understood them, but it totally is a different language. And then of course there's French sign language! (With which ASL has more in common than with British, I am told.)
(Yes, it's kind of ironic that Mucca knows more ASL than the actual deaf person here. :P One of these days I'll have time/energy/funds to take a class, I swear.)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 06:10 pm (UTC)I had a similar experience a while back. Somebody translated one of my favourite porn fics into Russian. Out of curiosity, I took the sentence that--judging from its position in the fic--was "It turns you on" and stuck it in Google Translate. It came out "It winds you."
I thought 'Huh. Winding. That's a really interesting way of putting it. I kind of like that.' Then I clicked on "winds" to see alternative translations and realised it was winds-as-in-movement-of-air, not winds-as-in-being-wound. Just an error on Google's part, not a neat Russian colloquialism.
For some reason, removing an extraneous space at the end of the quote was enough to change it to "It seduces you", which...makes sense, yes, but it's so much more boring.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-02 05:49 am (UTC)Drives home the point that all of the times Daniel Jackson or whoever just calmly translates shit in a language they've never encountered before...well, it's never a surprise exactly when they get the idiom wrong. :P
Though it was kind of cool sometimes with the Russian people I knew as a teenager, who were trying to learn English--sometimes we'd stumble across an idiom or colloquialism that actually was the same in English and Russian.