Language Flubs

I'd hoped to get in some real language practice before coming to Moscow. And I'd like to say that I really, really tried! But the summer just got in the way. I had places to see and people to visit, so clearly there just simply wasn't time to spend hours in front of Rosetta Stone learning the Russian basics! That said, I headed to Moscow knowing little to no Russian. (And the little I did know wasn't exactly going to be useful. After all, how often does one need the phrase, “the woman drinks”??)

This certainly led to some interesting language encounters. I wanted to be friendly to our guards when entering the university and dorms, so said what I thought was “hello!” every morning. Only about a week and a half later did I realize that I was waving at them with a big smile, calling out “Thank you!!”

Fortunately, my Russian has progressed a bit since then.* Today, during a visit to Peter the Great's cabin in Moscow,** one of the other students and I had a delightfully goofy time practicing our new Russian vocabulary. (“Is that a purse?” “No, it's a dog!”) When we reached Peter the Great's log cabin, I decided to bust out some of my new vocabulary, “Eta dom. Eta malinki dom! Eta OCHIN malinki dom!!” (This is a house. This is a small house! This is a VERY small house!!) I was so proud of my little phrase until my friend noted that, perhaps, it might come off as a tad insulting to the Russians there. This was, after all, one of Peter the Great's cabins. Whoops!


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*Alas, the first three weeks of language class were a bit of a bust, though it picked up considerably one we received a new teacher this week. Our first language teacher would cover huge amounts of unrelated material, so that it wasn't really possible to absorb it all in such a short time-frame. (One of the students said the material we'd seen in 2 weeks covered language grammar that she didn't look at for most of her first semester!) For instance, our professor “taught” us the various forms of “to go” – past, present, and future – all in the last 15 minutes of a class period one day. Please keep in mind that we'd only started with the alphabet the week before. Luckily, our end-of-period test was open book. However, when I looked up words in the dictionary during the test, she acted astonished, interrupted my test and demanded to know what I could possibly be looking up. After all, she exclaimed, she had taught us these words already!!

**Peter the Great spent a couple of months in this cabin in 1705 to supervise ship-building in Arkhangelsk. The cabin was eventually moved to and renovated in Moscow in 1935.