enrollments

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear SEELANGers:

It's spring, and a young slavist's fancy turns to ...

enrollments.

Our Slavic Department has updated its web page

(http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/slavic/)

and our page now has comments from students as to why they value studying
Russian at our university.  Perhaps some of these thoughts and ideas would
be useful to you as you try to increase enrollments and I share some of them
for that reason:

>>From the humorous ....

Backwards "R"s -- enough said!

Watch the X-Files and get a whole lot more out of the scenes in which
                characters speak Russian!

 You can laugh at the mistakes in subtitles in TV and movies.

 Revisit some of your favorite films and watch again to figure out what
                they are really saying, for example, in Letter to Brezhnev,
Clockwork
                Orange, So I Married an Ax Murderer, Russia House, Red October,
                Red Heat, No Way Out, Red Dawn, Air Force One, The Saint, Dr.
                Strangelove, Moscow on the Hudson, White Nights, and many of the
                James Bond movies.

 Find out for yourself if Sean Connery can really speak Russian!

Learn Russian to follow the action in the NHL better and know how to
                pronounce the Russian players' names!

Job opportunities -- openings in Yeltsin's cabinet right now!

To the serious ...

Russian has no present tense of the verb "to be"!

Russian is unique. Everyone studies Spanish or French. Be different!

 Russian literature is among the most beautiful and exciting national
                literatures in the world.

Learning Russian helps you better understand English grammar: you'll
                finally learn when to use "whom" and when to use "who".


In other news that may be of importance for enrollments, Public Television
is sponsoring a three-part program on the faces of Russia that will air this
summer (June 17, June 24, and July 1, I believe) -- narrated by James
Billington.  The program is also available for purchase through National
Public Television.

If anyone else has thoughts to share about increasing enrollments, please
share them on the list so that we may all use whatever strategies we can to
bring more students into our classes!

With best regards,

Ben Rifkin




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Benjamin Rifkin

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
Coordinator of Russian-Language Instruction

Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Dr.
Madison, WI  53706  USA

voice:  608/262-1623
fax:  608/265-2814
e-mail:  brifkin at facstaff.wisc.edu

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