As I start to write this post, I finished lesson eleven of my twelve-lesson Russian evening course last night and I have one more lot of homework and one more lesson left and then I’m done. I’m glad for two reasons. One is that this is hard – learning anything with a different alphabet is going to be more difficult than using the letters I’ve known my entire life and Russian has some delightful grammar that English doesn’t, even at this really early beginner’s stage. The second is that I’m acutely, horribly aware that I’m learning the language of the enemy during a war of the enemy’s making. Putin invaded Ukraine the day of lesson six and the teacher has steadfastly not mentioned it. We’ve whispered about it in breakout rooms while doing our exercises but other than that, we’ve had six wartime lessons in which no war has been mentioned.
It’s online. I’ve been after a beginner’s Russian course for years but the only one that’s remotely accessible has always been on a day I can’t do. I was delighted to get this advert on Instagram in January, online courses with an institution in London which was running a sequence of courses on a day I was available for twelve weeks in a row. I could have a real teacher and real classes and because of the plague, I could do it conveniently from home. I know we’ve all gone off Zoom in a big way but I’m so glad things went online because I couldn’t have done this otherwise.
My course is beginners module 1. There are three modules per level and five levels in total. I wondered early on if I was going to do beginners module 2 but I decided quite quickly not to. The handwriting – oh, you’re going to hear about that! – is one big reason. A second is that I don’t think it’s worth the financial cost for the use I’m going to get. A third is that if I continue, I won’t know where to stop until I’ve completed all fifteen modules and probably the literature one. And a fourth, of course, is the war.
I like to talk about things I’m doing. I particularly like to talk about the languages I’m learning. I like to use them. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the best way to learn is to use it out loud regularly at home. But I can’t go around speaking Russian in public during a war and I can’t gloat on social media about it either and quite frankly, that does take a certain amount of the shine off learning it. I’ve got the books, I know where the online resources are and if I want to self-study a bit further, I probably can.
So, onto the lessons!
We started with a class of thirteen but by now we’re settled at seven. Admittedly, it’s not always the same seven. We have a core of five and then three others who’ve missed a couple of lessons here and there, plus five who’ve dropped out. One hung on until lesson six and the other four didn’t make it past the alphabet stage.
Yes, we had to spend three lessons learning the alphabet. Marina broke it up with counting to five and then to ten, and with simple introductory dialogues but we did spend most of the time learning the letters – and worse, the handwriting. I was a bit ahead of the class at first because I already knew most of my letters. The thing was, I knew them in that familiar blocky printing you see on your computer and Marina was adamant that we had to learn the curly-wurly illogical handwritten version. I sit with her on one screen and Google Translate on the other and when she writes things on her little whiteboard and holds them up for us to read or copy, I look it up so I can see what letters I’m actually looking at.
See, the thing with Russian cursive is that 85% of the alphabet is some variant on u or n. More loops, twists at the end, longer or shorter stems. And then there’s T. Capital T is ok – it’s a slightly curlier version of our English written T only it has three stems instead of one but the way they translate that into a small T is something that looks exactly like an English little m. In order to not confuse ourselves, we’ve been taught to draw a little bar over it so we know it’s a t and not an m but real Russian handwriting doesn’t give us that courtesy. Homework for the first three weeks was lines – write out the words that go with today’s set of letters and just keep practising the handwriting. I can see exactly why nearly a third of the class dropped out.
However, when we got started on the course book, it did at least start with usable Russian. I assume you did French at school. You started with “bonjour” and “je m’appelle” and “j’ai deux freres et j’aime le football”. We started at the airport. I don’t necessarily go as far as to say that it’s things you might actually use on your first trip to Russia but there are airport words you might want to recognise. Lots of “where is my passport?” “where is my luggage?” “I’m a tourist” etc, . Then we moved onto “the street” where we did directions and transport and then onto “my family” which is less about family and more about meeting people and learning the genitive case. Finally, we started chapter four last night – “where I’ve been” which is so far more about the past tense and prepositional case.
So I’m ok with the themes. Those are ok themes. The grammar, on the other hand…
First, there was the genitive case. Cases are a fun grammatical thing we don’t have in English – nor in French, Spanish or Norwegian which are the only languages I’ve studied before. Ok, I did encounter them when I had a go at Finnish and when I spent three days learning German on Duolingo but in both those cases, I fled at the sight of cases. My understanding is that the ending of words changes depending on context. Yeah, I’m so new to this that I can barely explain. Ok. Russian doesn’t say “Anton’s visa” or “the visa of Anton”. Russian says “visa Antona“. It doesn’t say “I have been to London”. It says “I have been Londone“. I know, in English that sounds a bit caveman-y. In Russian, that’s absolutely fine. Better than fine. It’s good and correct.
I’m ok with the prepositional. Mostly you just remove the stem and add an e and also it’s only coming up in this very specific context. The genitive, on the other hand, is a pig. Use it with possessions and certain numbers and verbs and a few other specific events. As long as I know it’s coming, I’m approaching ok with it but there’s no way I can figure out when I’m supposed to use it all by myself and it’s been the main subject of our lessons for about the last month.
Week 11, last night, we finally moved on to conjugating verbs. We’re still only just learning to recognise infinitives so we stumbled over that a bit. Didn’t help that we’d actually started on the past tense before the present. The past is easier. I’m accustomed to a different conjugation for I/you/he/she/we/you/they but Russian doesn’t do that. It just depends on whether the thing doing the past action is masculine, feminine, neuter or plural/formal. “I went” is exactly the same as “you went” or “he went”.
After I’d written up my notes and done my homework, which involved conjugating two verbs, I felt a lot happier with the present tense – bit surprised that it took until week 11 of 12 to encounter the present tense but Russian’s gonna Russian, right?
It’s the handwriting. Our homework has been getting longer lately – a mini personal essay, a bit of translation. I now write it out in those familiar blocky printed letters on my phone (it has a Russian keyboard; I can’t put my laptop’s keyboard into Russian because I don’t have labels and it’ll bewilder me) and then I copy that into my notebook in my best curly-wurly handwriting. Then, if Marina asks us to read any of it out, I’ve got something I can actually read. No, I can’t read my own Russian handwriting. I suspect I wouldn’t be feeling quite so glad I’ve only got one lesson left if we’d been painstakingly writing those blocky letters.
Because some of my notes are in my notebook and some are scribbled all over my coursebook and a few are in my workbook so I’ve been trying to keep it all tidy in Notion and write it up every few weeks. We start with the date (another thing I look up on Google Translate rather than try to interpret Marina’s handwriting) and I give every week an icon so I can easily find things – for example, we sing a song about a horse. I know where the link and the words are. They’re in week five, the one with the horse icon. Where’s the pages on the weather? Oh, week six, with the sun icon.
And tonight was lesson 12! I’m finished!
I’d hoped all eight of us would get together to celebrate it being our last lesson but in fact, there were only five of us since it’s now the Easter holidays. We went over the stuff we did last week, got into breakout rooms to do some exercises, I demonstrated a long-realised tendency to be much better at Russian when the teacher isn’t present and we were set homework. The teacher is mostly assuming we’re all going to be back for Beginners 2 in a couple of weeks and from the sound of it, it’ll be literally continuing from where Beginners 1 left off: the last third of chapter 4. I’ve done some of the homework. I’m using this for my Rebel Linguist badge and one of the clauses is to pick a book, chapter or article to read at the end of three months’ language practice. Realistically, there was never any way that I would be ready to read even an article so I decided to read and translate the text at the end of chapter four, since this course was supposed to go up to chapter 3/4. I figured the very end of chapter 4 was probably just a tiny bit further than we’d actually get to in lessons but not so far that I’d have to give up before I even began.
So, no. Not going on with it. It’s all been very educational but it’s also been really hard – Russian is like no language I’ve ever studied before and I think I’d like my Thursday evenings back but if I decide to continue, I’ve got the resources and I can have a good go at teaching myself for a while if I want.