Holly of mylittlerussia is spending the summer at the Middlebury College, learning Russian:
Вчера вечером я дала слово только говорить по-рускки до конца летней сессии! Но, по-скольку не все говорят по-русски, я буду писать на русском и дать английский вариант.
Yesterday I took the language pledge to only speak russian until the end of the summer session. However, seeing as most people don’t speak Russian, I’m going to write in Russian and give the English translation.
Good luck to Holly - I’m sure it’ll be an amazing benefit to her Russian. I lived in Russia for a whole year, and never had the courage to limit myself to speaking just Russian. In retrospect, I should have, because I became far too lazy, switched back to speaking English at the dorm each evening, and learnt far less that I otherwise would have. Next time, next time…
Other Russian learners might want to check out mylittlerussia more often too, for the chance to see day to day text regularly translated between Russian and English.
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Katy 07.13.05 at 3:10 pm
I was going to do that — but living 40 minutes from Middlebury, I’d probably try to escape and see my boyfriend.
Nathan 07.13.05 at 5:26 pm
This was the big drawback of being posted to a city with 6 Americans and living on my own. My Russian got pretty damned good (I was quite surprised to find myself having a fairly complex discussion about race issues in the US–something I can’t even imagining finding the words to do now), but would have been superb had I not had English speakers around.
Not living with a family didn’t help either. My training host mother spoke English to me all the time, but being isolated out in a village got me speaking some pretty decent Uzbek.
Katy 07.13.05 at 9:27 pm
I’m all for in-country learning… you’re forced to figure it out.
Midd tries to emulate that, but it is tough. Good thing that there is almost nothing to do in Middlebury.
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