Why students do not study Russian anymore

[Kenneth E Udut]

I think
if a professor
could get students
to become interested in the
beauty of the Russian language,
not the skeleton, but the skin,
the clothing, the makeup, the jewelry
(to speak metaphorically), you'll have 'em hooked.

I don't know if I'd be able to
go back to school to study
Russian myself (I'm stuck on
my own, even though I live in
an area in New Jersey where
I should have no trouble finding
Slavs of all stripes) -- but if I were
in a classroom environment, I'd
like to see some things that
keep me HUNGRY for the language:

Total Physical Response (as well as the Storytelling
version later on)
Poem recitating - especially rhyming poetry,
as well as the more metric types
Guest native Russian speakers reading
from Dostoyevsky
Guest Russian monk or priest and Rabbi
and other religions that are common in Russia
to give a talk on Russian religious life (are not
college students fasctinated by "foreign" looking
religions?)
Russian dancing and music
Russian food
Russian costumes

I also think that every university library
should have a few copies of Pimsleur's
Russian course for the students to use --
unorthodox as it may be in its presentation
of grammar, I have to say that it really is the
only on-your-own Russian language learning method
that is working for me in a usable way.

I think the labels used for the various grammatical
points should be left out for first year students.  For me,
it was too much too soon in the materials I've worked
with, and so, 1 1/2 years after starting to learn Russian in
my spare time, I *still* have trouble with very basic
things.

I think prefixes should be introduced early,
though, as well as a steady diet of roots.
Getting a feel for these has helped me
learn how to puzzle out a word, even if I do not
still know its case.

I think prefixes and roots (and to some degree, suffixes
like "nost'") are something that is intuitive to
English speakers, since we have so many prefixes
of our own, as well as many roots, but we DON'T have
as much in the way of inflections.

I think I spent two weeks on a "high" when
I started noticing all of these words with "bez"
at the beginning - and even though I didn't know
what the words meant (because my knowledge of
roots is slower than my knowledge of prefixes),
I at least knew that it means "without"-something.

Give the students tools that can help them figure
things out on their own - imperfectly, certainly
(for when can anybody really be called fluent?
The put-on-a-pedistile "native speaker" doesn't
live up to that standard either all of the time). --
but at least some tools.

Oh!  And definately teach 'em how to write
in Russian script right away.  That's a fun
sense of competence.

And another thing -- the Spanish telenovellas
("soap operas") that I see on NTV from time to
time (they're currently running "Vdova Blanko"
or "La Viuda de Blanco" (or, probably in English,
The Widow of Blanko)) - and the Russian used
in the voiceover is very-nearly comprehendable to me.

I don't always follow what they're saying, but
I do know 90% of the words they're using, and the
more I watch it, the more that 'chunks' of meaning come
across.  I would guess that an Intermediate Russian
student would probably be able to fully understand it.

[now if only I could get transcripts of it!)

[Ideally, I'd rather be going to college to
study Russian, but $$$ are too high to enroll
for a working boy like myself,
and Russian doesn't seem to be the kind of
course that most colleges would offer a community
audit for).

-Kenneth


-Kenneth

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000 15:12:39 -0700 "E. Boyle" <emboyle at U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
writes:
[...]
> I do not think we need to alter the grammar.  We need to change the
> way we
> present the language though.  No one will become enthralled with
> anything
> that's presented as merely so many grammatical structures.

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