Language and Culture

About a month after we arrived Doug's coworkers (Uzbek citizens) gave us a gift of traditional Uzbek wedding garb. They are elaborate, as you can see. We had no idea what to wear with them so there we are in our jeans. What a nice memory of Tashkent culture and the kindness of those with whom Doug works.

In Uzbek culture, when two people who know each other greet each other they ask the same sort of questions we’d ask someone we hadn’t spoken to for a while: How are you? How is your family? Are you still happy at your job? Is your house in order? Etc. The funny thing is, they ask these questions without breaking to await an answer and simultaneously. They talk right over each other not waiting or expecting responses. Kind of like when we say “How are you?” and all we really want to hear is “Fine, thanks.” To hear someone really tell how they are can be throw one’s day out of balance. Several years ago, I got tired of always saying “Fine.” I had read somewhere what a shame it was that we asked people how they were but really didn’t care too much. So I started truthfully answering the question. I’m grumpy today. Hungry. Happy. Sad. I usually didn’t give details, I just answered truthfully. That is a habit I cannot continue in Russian. When asked by one of the guards how I was and I replied “tired” he corrected me. There is a typical answer which translates “normal” in English – whatever that is. So I’m walking around Tashkent telling people I’m normal!

One of the frustrations of studying Russian is the way they print their language. They use the Cyrillic alphabet which has two letters which look similar: e and ë. The problem is, in much printed material (like my textbook) they don’t print ë, they just print e. Apparently, this stems back to the early years of printing when making those two little dots was difficult. I have no idea why publishers haven’t realized the year and progress that has been made in printing but they insist on keeping e and ë looking the same thus misspelling many words. These two letters do not sound alike. e sounds like “yeh” and ë sounds like “yo” (long o). What winds up happening is, I make lots of errors when reading text because of their misspellings. I’m frustrated. Learning this language is difficult enough without the deliberate misspelling of words which leads me to mispronounce them.

What really blows my mind is how everyone just laughs at me as though it is such a little thing to get worked up about. Imagine picking up a novel to read in which none of the lower case t’s were crossed and they all looked like l’s. We are familiar enough with our own language that we’d figure out what the word was supposed to be but I imagine we’d have to pause plenty of times thus interrupting our reading. Would you give such a book to someone learning English?

When I started studying Russian, I was taught the alphabet that included e and ë. I wonder why they didn’t just put two e’s next to each other and try to teach us that one is pronounced “yeh” and the other pronounced “yo”. I’ll tell you why. Because the next question from the students would have been, “How will we know when to say “yeh” and when to say “yo”? They would have had to answer, “You won’t know. Not until you’re fluent, anyway. In the meantime, you just have to memorize them.” It’s funny in writing; it’s not so funny in the classroom.

In my last blog I told you I would be telling stories at a Chai Chat. I did that and it went very well. I arrived a little over 30 minutes early to get a feel for the room and set up. The students arrived a full 30 minutes early! No alone preparation time for me! For ten minutes or so they sat and I stood and we all looked at each other. (I get shy at the darndest times.) I made myself walk up the aisle to see what would happen. Questions happened. I stopped three times to answer questions from three different groups of students. Where are you from? What job do/did you have? What grammatical mistakes do Americans make? And many comments like, “Your Russian isn’t too good but if you keep practicing it will be.” One boy wanted to know some American slang. My first thought was, ‘I’m the wrong one to ask.’ The only thing I could think of is how some young men call each other “Dawg” as in “’sup Dawg?” He liked the sound of that.

As is typical in Tashkent, about 95% of the students were wearing all black or dark gray. I noticed one colored sweater. I attended the next week’s Chai Chat given by a friend of mine and had the time to count how many people were wearing a color other than black. I counted 10 out of about 170. These are the same people, by the way, who walk in the road rather than the sidewalk and are comfortable doing this at night. One more reason I don’t want to drive here.

The students enjoyed the stories and participating in the storytelling game we played. They knew their parts of speech! In America I played this game in the schools in which I’d ask the students to name some nouns, adjectives and places – which they could easily do. When I asked them to name prepositions I usually had to teach them what a preposition is. These kids knew.

Afterwards, some students came to me with more questions. One girl asked me if I thought that people could learn all about life from stories. I answered her wrong. I hope she writes me (she has my e-mail). I told her that I think you just might be able to. She then told me that sometimes people tell lies in their stories when they are trying to teach about life. I agreed. I added that sometimes we are just not ready for the lesson of the story so it seems wrong or impossible. One boy came up to me to inform me that I had not answered the question he had asked me during the question and answer period. I must tell you that this boy spoke English but was trying to hard to have an American accent with proper “Rs” that he contorted his mouth and I had a difficult time understanding him. After asking him to repeat himself (during the Q & A period) I just said something like “I think I know what you’re trying to ask me . . .” and I gave an answer. He was very polite about it.

I know we cannot learn all about life from stories; we must live life to learn it. I also know that using stories can speed up the process.

A Chai Chat

On January 14, I am going to do what is called a Chai Chat. This is an weekly event at the Embassy. It is an opportunity for local students to visit the American Embassy, hear one of the diplomats or spouses talk and take questions thereby practicing their English.



I went to one Chai Chat when I first arrived. A woman led songs from her childhood. She had a room full of high school students singing “Old MacDonald” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” (in a round), “ABC”,“This Land is Your Land”, “B-I-N-G-O”, “The Eensy Weensy (or Itsy Bitsy, depending on where you were raised) Spider” and more. At the end she asked which were favorites that they wanted to sing again and she got several requests. I was amazed that high school students would want to sing songs like that. Most of them sang, laughed and really seemed to have a good time.


At my Chai Chat I am going to do storytelling with them. Most of you know that my main goal here in Tashkent is to get strong enough in my Russian language skills that I can go out and learn local folklore from people and share American folklore with locals. It will be a long time before I’m ready for that, but this Chai Chat is an opportunity for me to start sharing and I can do it in English.


I will begin with a story I often begin with when I go into elementary schools and tell. It is a personal story about how I thought my father did not love me when I was growing up. I share a (slightly embellished) story of the day I broke my arm while trying to pop a wheely on my bicycle. I go on and on about how mommy comforted me but all dad did was yell and be grumpy. Why? Because when I came home injured I dropped my bike at the foot of the driveway – a no-no. He was under the car changing the oil and yelled for me to pick up my bike. I was in pain and ignored him. He came into the kitchen angry with me while mom was comforting me. He started to tell me again to pick the bike up when he realized I was really hurt. He knew he had to get me to the hospital. The more he tried to hurry the more obstacles he encountered: the oil change had to be finished, the bike in the drive had to be driven around, he had to contend with traffic and red lights on the way to the hospital, the car had to be parked, paperwork had to be filled out, etc. etc. All the time he dealt with all this (read: yelling at the drivers, swearing under – or on top of – his breath) mommy was holding me and comforting me. Obviously daddy didn’t love me but mommy did, right? The students to whom I’ve told this story jump to my dad’s defense. It’s really encouraging. This is an excellent “bridge” story; we all have something like this in common.


I haven’t chosen all the stories I’ll tell that day but I will include some storytelling games where the students work together in creating a story or two.


Sometimes I feel so foreign here, like I am so different that I don’t belong. I understand that. Yet I also know that, though I am so different, I am as much the same. I’ve shared with you what a difficult time I have understanding spoken Russian - even words I know and use. The other day at the vegetable stand I frequent, a man said something to me right after taking a big bite of something. It came out just as it would in English, all garbled and incomprehensible. I turned and looked at a couple of women who were watching this (women who recognize me and know I do not speak much Russian) and I made mumbling sounds and a funny face. We all laughed together (except the man – he didn’t notice). Humor is a great bond.


Stories also make a strong bond. Many countries have their own version of Cinderella, for instance. Many cultures and religions have their unique version of the creation and great flood stories. Through all the variations in the story details (Did Cinderella have a fairy godmother or a magic tree? A prince or an enchanted fish? Did it rain or did someone cry until the earth flooded?) the story still comes through.


It is important to me to teach people of all ages that they can often find within themselves what they so desperately seek elsewhere. For instance, people everywhere turn to strangers for entertainment (television, cinema, recorded music, etc.) when good company can be as entertaining and much more rewarding than television every will be. When I taught piano I loved the house parties where we played for each other all night. I particularly loved Halloween parties that usually wound up with the late partiers telling scary stories to each other. I’ll take that over a good, fright film anytime – and I LOVE fright films. When Doug and I lived in Minnesota, we regularly gathered with people and sang. This was no formal choir; we never performed. Sometimes we didn’t sound very good; sometimes we sounded excellent and to be a part of that sound was very exciting – more exciting than singing along with a new recording by my favorite group. So, with that said, I want to inspire these Uzbek students to turn to their own creativity and the ingenuity of their friends for entertainment. It’s free. It is more rewarding to feel a part of the “show” rather than envying those strangers who are. It brings out of us what we weren’t aware of, it awakens what we have put to sleep and it develops a maturity in us. I am speaking of trusting our intuition, trusting others to teach and to learn through story or music and reviving the old endangered value of a close knit group versus a broad spectrum of acquaintances.


I need to say that I find nothing wrong with watching some television or paying top dollar for concert tickets. It’s getting lost in the near worship of celebrity that is disturbing to me. I also see the value in having a broad spectrum of acquaintances; it enhances our world perspective first hand. I think it is dangerous to have 10,000 'friends' on Facebook and no one to sit down and laugh or cry with when you need it at 2:00 AM.

I'll close with a few pictures of a Tashkent snow. I'm posting these with my Minnesota friends in mind. You recently got somewhere in the neighborhood of three feet of snow, right? We got about a third of an inch! But, remember, this place if very similar to Phoenix weather-wise so that's big, exciting stuff! You couldn't shovel this snow if you wanted to. Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes) would have to do his snowmen house of horrors in miniature. It snowed all morning and, by late afternoon, it sounded like it was raining because of the melt. The top right picture shows the infamous tree from "The Hill and the Tree" post of December 5.