Original music by Jonathan Huggins
Transcript:
Hi everyone and welcome back to the second episode of the Language Meanderings podcast. My name is Jonathan. I got some really good feedback from the first episode. Thank you everybody who sent me some comments and one friend mentioned that I had completely forgotten to talk about Russian.
Today I’m going to talk a little about my kind of dormant fascination for Russian that started probably back in 2000 when I was teaching myself a little bit of Russian with some of my Dad’s method books and language books and some audio programs like Pimsleur. I tried to get into it a little bit, but I didn’t get very far and I still remember keeping a notebook and I was chatting with some people on icq if any of you still remember that program for messaging. A lot of people would send me a message and I would have to decipher what they were saying in all the Cyrillic and at that time there was no Google Translate. There weren’t many online dictionaries so I had to use a paper dictionary and go through and try to figure out the declensions and the verb conjugations, and by the time I had figured out this message, it was something like “Hey, you’re not responding. You’re taking a lot of time to write back. I have to go. Bye!” And by the time I figured out that message the people had been long gone offline.
When I moved to France, I didn’t really get a chance to continue with the Russian. I think the only thing I remember is a couple of times, sitting next to the Notre Dame cathedral and looking at one of the stores that sold religious objects and things and teaching my girlfriend религиозные атричты or something like that that said religious objects and I knew that because the French and the English, they all the said the same thing. It was just a translation. So, there were a couple of times when we just sat there and looked at these Cyrillic letters and tried to figure out what they were saying.
Then in 2011 after living in Mexico City for a couple of years I came across a school in the neighborhood where I was living at the time and it taught Russian, French, and English and apparently, that’s maybe the only school in Mexico City that teaches Russian. So I was really lucky to find that and I signed up with a friend of mine who said he was interested in learning some Russian. So we started some classes together and we had this really, really difficult teacher from Moscow who, I think he grew up in the Soviet era and he was just very strict, very difficult. Unfortunately, the classes with him didn’t last very long, but he was replaced by a really good teacher who I enjoyed working with. So I continued the Russian classes for like two years and when my kids were born, things just got really complicated for continuing with the Russian classes, but I continued studying the Russian on my own and I started developing some web apps for looking at Russian verb conjugations and adjectives and noun declensions. And that’s been really helpful to look at and I’ll post links to that on my website.
So I was just kind of working on my own until about a year ago I started using another messaging program called Go Speaky, which is excellent and I would recommend that to everybody who wants to speak many languages with a lot of people online. I met a couple of native speakers from Russia and they started to help me and correct some of my messages. One friend in particular started to tell me about a language marathon program that she was getting involved in in the summer, this last summer and then she told me that in October, they opened it up to foreigners who were studying Russian. That’s how I got involved in the Language Heroes program on VK ВКонтакте, which is kind of like a Russian Facebook platform, and that Language Heroes program is organized by a really excellent polyglot. Her name is Evgenia Kashaeva and she does a lot of excellent work to promote the Russian language and then also the study of foreign languages.
So, the October, this past year, 2015, I started to really start focusing on my Russian studies. I think I was a bit too ambitious with my goals. I wanted to learn…read all of Chekhov’s short stories, that didn’t happen. I started making vidoes on youtube to keep track of my progress. I wasn’t as diligent as I wanted to be, but despite all those setbacks and failures I think with my goals, I still managed to be voted king of the marathon, which was a big surprise and a very nice way to make me feel very welcome in that Russian language learning community. Now I’m in the second level of that program and still I have a lot of contact with Russian speakers. I make regular skype language exchanges with English and Russian and take some Russian classes with an italki teacher. There’s just a lot of positive feedback from the Russian community and so that’s a little bit of my experience with the Russian language.
It’s not as developed as my French or my Spanish, but it’s amazing the language studies that you can do online with platforms like Facebook, italki, Go Speaky, govoluble, just to name a few. Particularly, if you are interested in language exchanges, I would really recommend joining my Facebook group, which is called Language Exchange, and at the moment of this podcast we are just about to reach 7,000 members after I created it back in July, 2015. So it’s been growing pretty well and it’s a great place to meet people from all different language backgrounds and countries.
So, that’s my Russian studies for the moment. If you want to send me a comment in Russian or if you are also learning Russian, please send me a comment and let me know what your level is and I would be really happy to help you with your Russian studies or point you in the right direction to find a language exchange partner or different websites where you can find materials to help you progress. Thank you for listening and as always if you’d like to schedule an English class with me or hear more about my language meanderings, you can visit my website at hugginsinternational.com or send me an email at hugginsinternational@gmail.com. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to the next podcast.