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.
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