Learning Russian Part I

 Sign for a "Dino-Park"

The good news is that I seem to remember most of the Russian I learned while living here.

The bad news is that it never was very much.

My first week back I was labeling some containers in the kitchen, and I remembered that the word for flour is “myka” (pronounced “moo-KA”). Slava asked me if I knew the meaning of “myka,”pronounced “MOO-ka.” No, I didn’t. It turns out that myka can mean either flour or “anguish.” With just this one example you can imagine badly I can garble the Russian language.

Ah, let me give you another example. The other day I was in the kitchen with our Russian daughter-in-law, and as she was cutting up vegetables I asked her if she wanted an onion. Only, what I offered her was a manhole cover, Slava said.

Russian grammar is complicated. In addition to suffixes and prefixes, some words have infixes – take a word apart, stuff something in the middle, and put the word back together. Nouns have three declensions and six cases. Verbs have two conjunctions and lots of irregular forms. So many opportunities to make mistakes!

To improve my Russian I like watching three things on television: sports, weather reports, and advertising. These three are presented with limited vocabulary. Win-lose, wet-dry, buy now…

My greatest skill is in listening. My good friend Galina knows English well, but prefers to speak in Russian. So when we get together, she speaks Russian and I speak English. We get along just fine.