Citizens of Former Soviet Republics View the Russian Language as a Remnant of the Soviet Union

[Robert Lawless]

Maybe there's a time difference and some difference in location. My 
experiences were mainly in the 1990s and with international students here 
in the USA. Robert.

At 12:22 PM 4/2/2008, Ronald Kephart wrote:
>On 4/2/08 11:06 AM, "Robert Lawless" <robert.lawless at wichita.edu> wrote:
>
> > At any rate, I certainly and almost inevitably encountered hostility when
> > using Russian with these people. Robert.
> >
>I was pretty fluent in Russian in 1968, when I hitch-hiked through Slovenia
>and what was then Czechoslovakia (Bratislava to Prague). Of course I had to
>use Russian, but interestingly people seemed at that time to be genuinely
>amazed that a USAniac knew anything at all in any Slavic language and they
>were very willing to let me try Russian on them and to use it in return if
>they could. For some years afterwards I even carried on a good deal of
>correspondence with some of the people I met, nearly always in Russian, the
>only thing we shared. Of course at that time most had studied Russian in
>school.
>
>By the way, Italians seemed happy to accommodate to my Spanish; French, not
>so much.
>
>In Paris (Bois de Bologne), I found myself camped between a group of
>Argentine boy scouts and a troop of Czech girl scouts. Naturally, they
>wanted to interact. For several hours I acted as interpreter between them,
>one of the most exhausting linguistic experiences I've ever had.
>
>Ron