Russian Blog

A while back I posted an entry with the title ‘The Russian Emotion: Sickness’ , but it seems that I left one way of expressing feeling under the weather unmentioned back then. One early morning last fall a Russian friend told me: «Ты выглядишь неважно.» That didn’t make much sense at all to me at first, since I thought she had just said to me: “You look unimportant”. Well, perhaps I wasn’t wearing a smart suit and it could be that I went too easy on the mascara that morning, but does that make a person look unimportant? I was, to say the least, puzzled, this leading to silence on my part and caused her to further develop our conversation on her own with a follow-up question: «Не заболела ли ты?» [You’re not sick, are you?] That was when I had myself a little aha-moment and answered: «Нет, не думаю, хотя горло немножко болит» [No, I don’t think so, even though my throat hurts a little]. What turned out to be the beginning of a cold was also the beginning of understanding the second meaning of the adverb «неважно» – unwell; not very well.

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Learning Russian is no walk in Gorky Park, something I suppose most of you are already more than well aware of. Often we talk about the difficulties of this language, we try to sort out verbs of motions and what not, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how much fun it is? Because it is fun! Learning a new language is more than simply getting a new set of foreign words and grammatical rules, it is giving yourself another way of expressing yourself, new emotions to go with those new words, new jokes to make with the help of those grammatical rules. I have long suspected that the main reason as to why I spent so many hours slaving over my homework when I was studying «русский язык как иностранный» [Russian as a foreign language] in Omsk, Siberia, was because nobody laughed at my jokes. To make people laugh I had to learn how to be funny in Russian. (Yes, it took more time than just managing to say «Сколько стоит вон та булка серого хлеба?» [How much does that loaf of dark bread over there cost?] or «Можно воспользоваться вашим туалетом?» [May I use your restroom?] but it was definitely worth it!) With time you’ll come to know that the person you were when speaking Spanish back in school has nothing to do with the person who memorized Pushkin’s famous poem «Я вас любил». Speaking of funny, today I came across an interview with a teacher of Russian language as a foreign language , and especially her answer to the last one of the seven questions posed to her made me laugh out loud.

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