Outreach

[Lisa Frumkes]

I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, and I''ve been
teaching Russian to a 9-year-old American boy since June 1994.

This particular kid probably is a genius.  Case-in-point:  On Valentine's
Day, I asked him what holidays he'd like to learn how to say, and he came
up with "equinox" and "solstice", words at least one of my
college-educated housemates didn't know. The idea of learning Russian was
apparently all his own; his parents seem bewildered by the idea and not
in the least interested in learning it themselves.

We meet for two 30-minute sessions per week.

He's not at all troubled by the "odd" sounds, although he's not so
thrilled about writing the letters down.  Vowel reduction just happens
without much prompting on my part.  I tried teaching him just a couple
verbs and now he won't let me rest until he's seen all the different
types.  He's a little angry with me about case endings, but he seems to
like the fact that adjectives agree with their nouns.  I talked to him
about voiced and voiceless consonants, and he loved it.  I showed him some
Old Russian and Old Church Slavic texts, and now he wants to look at texts
in Old Cyrillic and Glagolitic too (he thinks jat is a really nifty
looking letter).  He just loves it when I tell him how various Russian
words are related to various English words. He likes looking at things on
maps more than he likes playing with my Russian Monopoly set.

In other words, this kid is a linguist's dream, especially a historical
linguist's dream.  Very much different from tutoring college-age students.
It's an experience I would recommend to all and sundry.

Lisa Frumkes
Doctoral Candidate
University of Washington