Relearning the Alphabet
So, we have now officially completed our first two weeks of language classes. To this point, B and I have studied together, since we were just going over phonetics and the different sounds each letter can make. Trust us, in Russian, that's a lot of sounds, and, more importantly, sounds that we're not used to saying!
This week we begin our regular lessons, meaning that we'll split up since we're at different levels of Russian. I (J) will take the morning shift with our teacher, and then we have an hour and a half for me to walk back to the apartment, take over Steven, and for B to leave and make it to her class. She'll take the afternoon shift with the lesson, and I'll watch Steven. Somewhere in there, we need to mix in a 2-hour stint with a language helper (daily for me, and twice a week for B). Of course, beyond that, we have lots of homeworks and drills to listen to and repeat. Oh, and at some point in all of our language study, we need to mix in some culture study and file all the data we learn about the Russian culture in our computer. It might sound like a lot, but others have done it before us, some with more and older children, so we're confident it can be done.
Here's a sample of one of J's notebook pages, in which he's written (OK, copied) a nice paragraph about Chapayeva Street.
In this shot, I took a picture of the whiteboard after I had written up the declension of the nouns "table" and "week" (one masculine and one feminine). Russian has 6 cases, meaning that nouns can have any of 6 different endings, depending on how the word is used in the sentence. On the left is the list: nominative, accusative, prepositional, genitive, dative, and instrumental. Actually, if you take into account that a Russian noun can have a different set of endings whether it's masculine, feminine, or neuter, that animate and inanimate objects have different endings, of course singular and plural differences, something else I'm forgetting, and the 6 cases, I think I counted 120 possible different endings for nouns at one point. Yikes!
Last week, our friends David and Erin, who are just finishing their stint here learning Russian and moving East, had a party for us to meet some Russian friends. Here you see the menu, typically Russian - Blini (Russian crepes), boiled potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and bread. Of course, we drank hot tea, which is practically a requirement.
Russians fix their blini with a variety of things, but one of the most popular is caviar. It's available in red and black varieties. You put it on the blini with some sour cream, and voila - extreme fishiness is yours. Caviar is basically fish eggs, and to me it tastes like you took the fishy flavor and concentrated it into little balls of fish flavor. If you like fish, you'll love it. If you're not a fish fan, you would probably hate it. I happen to be neutral toward fish, so caviar was, well, just OK. I certainly wouldn't pay a premium to eat it regularly, but it's kinda nice as a now-and-again treat, I suppose. Give me a few years, and I'll probably love it.
Instead of a Blog Debate™, this week's blog introduces a new feature of A Wandering Family: What is it For?™ In this feature, you'll examine a picture and try to guess what the item pictured is used for in Russia. Alternatively, we might show you some people doing something and you guess what it is. In this photo, J is standing next to a metal box of some sort - can you guess what it's for?
