Experience Fulbright

No, I don’t speak Russian, but they do in Uzbekistan. To be clear, the ability to speak Russian isn’t required for a Fulbright grant in Uzbekistan. Each award in the Fulbright catalog includes grant details like if language proficiency is required. I only considered countries that had no language requirement. I love the idea of speaking another language but even after 4 years of high school Spanish, plus one semester in college, I can barely have a conversation. I can however, ask where the bathroom is and order at a Mexican restaurant.  I can NOT do either of these in Russian.  So I’m going to need to learn some basic Russian, not for teaching, but for survival.

At this point in my preparation, I can say about three things in Russian:  да (yes), нет (no), and водка (vodka).  While useful, I don’t think that’s going to cut it. Luckily, Michael, the previous scholar from Uzbekistan with whom I was in touch, happened to know a Russian woman who now lives in my area and put me in touch with her. Turns out that she is a former Russian professor and was willing to give myself and my son private Russian lessons.

I knew immediately that I was going to love this woman. At our first lesson she showed us this video and told us that our homework for the week was to practice speaking with a Russian accent.

 

 

You can guess how long it took before my husband got tired of being asked, “Vot do you Vant for dinner?”

I’ve now had four lessons and have covered some essentials. I admit that I have been struggling with the alphabet. I’ve made up my own little mnemonic devices to help me remember some of the letters.  I’m doing okay with most of the new letters that I’ve never seen before, such as this one that I call a “Russian asterisk” which sounds like “zhu” or the S in treasure.

Other letters are easy because they are the same as in English, like M and T.  But then there are the tricky ones that look like English but are something else entirely in Russian. For example, when I see this letter: P, my brain think the P sound in English, like in Papa. Except that’s entirely wrong! In Russian, this letter is the R sound, like in Red. And to make matters worse, in Russian you have to roll your R sound!

Want to try a Russian tongue twister with the R sound in it? Click here.

One of the first words Natalia taught us was Hello, which in Russian is Здравствуйте. That looks pretty intimidating! But the wonderful thing about Russian is that is phonetic so as long as you can keep those letters and their sounds straight, you can sound out any word.

Здравствуйте = Zdravstvuyte 

Easy, right?

Yeah, not so much. I’ve decided to just use the informal version, привет (privet).

Right now my teacher is back in Россия visiting her family so we are studying on our own.  A friend gave us his copy of Rosetta Stone to use. I’ve often wondered how well this program works.  Now I get to see for myself. I’m only on lesson two right now, but I’ll definitely report back in a few months on how well the program works for me.

Between my formal lessons, Rosetta Stone, and an app on my phone I’ve learned to say the following things:

• Hello. (both formal and informal)
• Goodbye. (both formal and informal)
• Nice to meet you.
• My name is… What’s your name?
• Boy, girl, man, woman
• Cat, dog
• Good morning, afternoon, night
• I am American.
• Where?

I also know how to say Bread, Vodka, Gin, and Liquor. I wonder who programs these apps because these don’t seem like the most crucial words for me to learn.

Just to be clear, I have no grandiose ideas of becoming fluent in Russian in just 6 months, but I’m still hanging on to the notion that I can learn enough to not immediately be pegged as the American.

до свидания!