The Russian tongue

I had studied Russian in fits and starts before this year, but once I knew I was going to the country I put in more effort. Every time I study a new language I go about it in a different way, drawing from experience and new techniques that I constantly come across. With Russian I hoped that I could ignore the notoriously complicated grammar and focus on acquiring it more or less naturally. I studied it for six months, doing at least ten minutes a day but generally closer to half an hour on average. Say 90-100 hours in total.

Because of my love of phonetics I focused a lot on the sounds and the flow of the language. This paid off in a way, since people rarely switched to English on me and some guessed that I had Russian heritage. Someone that had spoken Russian with a grandparent once a week, maybe. Just a student, I said, though sometimes I mentioned that my grandmother was Polish.

Conversation was difficult. As nice as it is to speak with a good accent, it doesn't mean much without the words themselves. My method was to practice whole sentences at a time, thus internalizing some grammatical constructions easily while remaining fully ignorant of ones I hadn't come across. So I fumbled a lot, especially in the beginning, making sure adjectives matched nouns and pronouns were in the right case.

It was a bit stressful, as I mentioned previously. When you practice with a teacher or a Skype partner you don't quite feel the pressure that's palpable in a restaurant or a ticket line. To hear and understand my mp3s on my phone was great, to hear a string of jumbled syllables from my conversation partner was dismal.

Reading was nice. After a week or so the Cyrillic came back easily (having not looked at it since departing for Korea) and I generally knew what signs said. I still need a lot of practice to read books, but it's just something that will take time. It wasn't until years into studying German that it was truly easy to read average articles or books.

I grudgingly admit that Russian is a useful language and I should really put more effort into it. It really comes in handy in some places where German or English don't reach. I spoke it first on this trip in Vietnam and twice just today. I can function with it, and I can tell that with a few hundred more hours of studying it'll get to that wonderful point of being accessible at a moment's notice.