По-Русcки

Hi folks, here's a quick update on what's occupying my mind (and time) lately - learning Russian!  Per the experts, Russian is an extremely difficult language to learn, and I'm here to tell you today - it's true.

Usually I would be sitting in a classroom for 10 months at FSI (the Foreign Service Institute) with fellow Department of State colleagues, but in order to keep our family together when Mike started his job here, I was permitted to do my 10 months of study at a local university in Yekaterinburg.  

My experience so far reminds me a lot of the study abroad I did in Mexico almost 10 years ago.  Studying a foreign language in a foreign country has so many benefits, but plenty of challenges.  I have the benefit of being surrounded by the language and having to use it to survive, but I also have to figure out how to do all the local-university-things like show the right ID to the guard my first morning without knowing any guard or ID vocabulary.  

Much like in Mexico, I ride the bus/tram to and from school each day.  You jump on, and if it's super crowded, you pass your money up from the back and your fellow passengers pass back your receipt.  Above you see the bus stop where I get off, and the university building is the beige one on the right.

Below you can view a sampling of my homework!  Sentences!  The Cyrillic alphabet is a fun exercise for your brain, since most of the letters are familiar, but Я=yah, Н=N, И=I, Р=R, С=S, В=V, У=U, Х=H, well, you get the picture.

Notice I just types two backwards letters (Я and и).  I crack myself up because I keep accidentally turning around the Cs too.  Trust me, there are no backwards-Cs in Russian.  My teachers just kind of look at me when I do that....

Before our group left on our Mexico study abroad, we were required to read a book about adjusting to a new language/culture during the semester.  I remember a graph that showed the trajectory of how you would feel - you would start on a high, so excited about everything, then after a few weeks you'd slump down to some lows as you became frustrated and perhaps homesick, and eventually you'd plane out (probably right before you left :).  This isn't my first rodeo, either living abroad or learning a new language, and I think I'm feeling all the emotions in the graph almost simultaneously - any given moment I can be super excited about new verb forms and conjugations, and the next I'm nearly in tears because I can't understand what I'm being taught.  And then I take a deep breath and try to plane out.  

And I try to remember that no matter how difficult it is to learn Russian, it is nowhere NEAR as difficult as trying to live here without speaking a lick of it.