Teaching ESL/EFL really makes you realize that some words are defined more loosely than others. Much is made, for instance, of the word home in English. This word does not directly translate into many other languages--or at least, does not translate in the sense of a place where one not only lives and sleeps but has a sense of security. The French cannot distinguish between a house and a home the way Britons and Americans can; neither, as far as I know, can the Russians.
You also start to realize, or to recollect, that some usages of particular words are very loose usages. When I was a freshman in high school, we had weekly vocabulary tests of "SAT" words. On our vocab tests, my teacher always made us not only give out a definition but use the word in a way that showed we understood what it meant. I remember being marked down for using proximity in the sentence, "She felt she had too close proximity to him." My teacher thought this did not quite convey the sense of the word, and no amount of protesting on my part could get him to change my grade.
When the words "United States" are used to refer to the state bordering the Rio Grande, I have always considered this to be a very loose usage of the name of my country. Somehow, I have never really been able to see Texas as part of the United States, in much the way I have never been able to see Staten Island as really part of New York City. In both cases, my feelings aren't based on snobbery--as a Brooklynite, I hated the idea many Manhattanites had that Brooklyn was not part of New York, and would never have imposed a similar idea on Staten Island. But Staten Island clearly never felt like part of New York. Its culture and way of life were totally different from those of the rest of the Big Apple. That Staten Island had tried to secede from New York in the recent past only confirmed by belief that it wasn't part of the city I lived in and loved.
Texas, to my way of thinking, is much the same. We are talking about a strange land where people give their daughters names like Gracie Belle and their dogs names like Lady Bird, worship a man named Tom Landry, and attempt to kill their neighbors over high school cheerleading. Texans are not lower or beneath other Americans, just different--different enough, in my opinion, that Texas should rightfully be what it in fact was before 1845 and what many of its inhabitants claim it still is, a separate country.
Nonetheless, I've had a bit of a Texas fixation lately. I have not the foggiest idea where this comes from. Not once in my short life have I lived in Texas or even stepped foot in Texas--not even to make an airline connection in Houston. Yet I find myself entranced by King of the Hill and a relatively new NBC show about Texas football calld Friday Night Lights. And tonight, I found myself downloading George Strait's country hit, "All My Ex's [sic] Live in Texas."
Now, until fairly recently, I didn't even know this was a song. I had heard people say, "all my exes live in Texas, that's why I live in Tennessee," and thought it was just some sort of weird American catchphrase, a dumb joke people made about divorce, Texas, or divorce in Texas. But somehow, I found out it is actually a song, and I wanted to hear it.
Well, as it turns out, the song itself is just about perfect for use in an EFL/ESL classroom. It's reasonably humorous, and its first verse contains no really complicated vocabulary apart from the names of towns in Texas. The only expression that requires explanation is the phrase "hang my hat".
Unfortunately, the second verse contains a reference to "transcendental meditation". For a low-level class, this would be challenging vocabulary. Transcendental is a hard word to explain even to native speakers. So I think I might have to reserve the song for a more advanced class.
Nonetheless, this has got me thinking up a whole Texas-themed class, with the song and a reading comprehension exercise about how Texarkana got its name. Such a reading would tie in nicely with the song, since one of the singer's exes is a "Rosanna down in Texarkana".
25 February 2008
A Taxonomy of Dough Balls
Last winter--the exact time is hazy, since I was unemployed, depressed, and generally unable to keep up with when things were happening--I went to hear Rabbi Kalmanofsky at Ansche Chesed give a defense of Conservatism as an ideology of Judaism. I don't recall much of what he said that evening, which suggests that it couldn't have been that earth-shattering. But I do recall his getting into a long discussion of Judaism as religion versus Judaism as ethnicity. Without G_d, he said, Judaism devolved into mere ethnic identity and couldn't hold onto the allegiance of Jews. Kreplach just aren't enough to sustain the Jewish people. After all, he said, every people has its own version of balls of dough filled with something.
I thought about that remark recently as I was looking through one of the various guides to Russia I've bought in preparation for teaching in Moscow. Russia's version of dough balls are called pelmeni and were described in my guidebook as "Siberian ravioli". They can be filled with various meats--pork is the most popular, but for those of us who keep kosher or "kosher style", there are also beef and lamb variants. Like pierogi (Polish dough balls), they can be variously boiled or fried. I have read that, in Russia, they are traditionally prepared all at once before the start of winter and preserved by being put outside the window in the snow.
The thought has struck me that a taxonomy of dough balls might make for an interesting lesson plan. When I was in Taiwan, my students expressed an interest in learning more of what they need to know to decipher English-language menus. I discovered quickly just how daunting a task this can be for English language learners when I did a lesson built around a menu from EJ's Luncheonette on the Upper West Side. Trying to make sense of Reubens, hash, and tetrazini, without any kind of real descriptions, proved hard. So did understanding menu headings like "Super Starters" or "Great Greens". But I thought learning what dough balls are called in different countries, as well as what they're filled with, might be a manageable task.
And so, here are a few new names for dough balls, made to simplify life not only for ESL/EFL students, but for all of us who have to keep track of so many different words for what are, essentially, the same food the world over:
Beef Wellington: Dough balls so teddibly British they insist on being served with crumpets.
Kreplach: Dough balls that say, "Eat, eat, or I'll kill myself!"
Pierogi: Dough balls that get conquered by the Russian army every couple of hundred years
Ravioli: Dough-a balls-a that-a end-a every-a word-a with-a vowel-a
Wonton: Dough balls that kowtow to the Emperor
I thought about that remark recently as I was looking through one of the various guides to Russia I've bought in preparation for teaching in Moscow. Russia's version of dough balls are called pelmeni and were described in my guidebook as "Siberian ravioli". They can be filled with various meats--pork is the most popular, but for those of us who keep kosher or "kosher style", there are also beef and lamb variants. Like pierogi (Polish dough balls), they can be variously boiled or fried. I have read that, in Russia, they are traditionally prepared all at once before the start of winter and preserved by being put outside the window in the snow.
The thought has struck me that a taxonomy of dough balls might make for an interesting lesson plan. When I was in Taiwan, my students expressed an interest in learning more of what they need to know to decipher English-language menus. I discovered quickly just how daunting a task this can be for English language learners when I did a lesson built around a menu from EJ's Luncheonette on the Upper West Side. Trying to make sense of Reubens, hash, and tetrazini, without any kind of real descriptions, proved hard. So did understanding menu headings like "Super Starters" or "Great Greens". But I thought learning what dough balls are called in different countries, as well as what they're filled with, might be a manageable task.
And so, here are a few new names for dough balls, made to simplify life not only for ESL/EFL students, but for all of us who have to keep track of so many different words for what are, essentially, the same food the world over:
Beef Wellington: Dough balls so teddibly British they insist on being served with crumpets.
Kreplach: Dough balls that say, "Eat, eat, or I'll kill myself!"
Pierogi: Dough balls that get conquered by the Russian army every couple of hundred years
Ravioli: Dough-a balls-a that-a end-a every-a word-a with-a vowel-a
Wonton: Dough balls that kowtow to the Emperor
24 February 2008
Colored TV and The Game of Village Idiots
People never quite know what others really assume about them, yet everyone has to guess this at one time or another. I have always guessed that others assume I'm not from money (which is true) and have never really been around people who are (which is not). From attending boarding school as a scholarship student and Columbia as one of the hundreds of students whose time there involves jobs serving potatoes in the dining hall and lining up books in proper order in the library, I've had my run-ins with the kind of people who subscribe to Robb Report.
My earliest inkling that there was a class above the one I belonged to, though, came not from school but from my own family. My father's side of the family (though not my mother's--not by a long shot) was always fairly well off (my father might have been so too had he not had found his metier in journalism). The Wilheims were not Bill Gates well off, but people who might have said they were "comfortable" and always appeared so.
When I was young, my grandmother, now of blessed memory, had a housekeeper named Venie. I recall very little about Venie save that she was black, rather heavy-set, and had apparently worked for my grandmother as far back as I, at such a young age, could imagine: my father told me that when he was little, Venie used to ask, by way of a joke, whether he wanted to see "Colored TV", and when he said "yes," would stand in front of the television set, blocking it with her ample girth. Even then, a time when people used the word "colored" to refer to people rather than laundry seemed impossibly far away in the past.
My grandmother saw herself as having an affectionate relationship with Venie and had given Venie various kinds of help over the years. I remember hearing once that, when the house Venie rented was going to be torn down and replaced with a large apartment complex, my grandmother had somehow secured for her first dibs on apartments in the new complex, for no more than she was already paying. Whether Venie held my grandmother in the same kind of affection, I cannot speculate. But to my young eyes, back then, it always seemed as though she did.
Despite her affections for Venie, or perhaps because of them, however, there were certain topics my grandmother did not discuss in front of her. Money was the chief of these subjects. My grandmother had the sense to know that Venie did not want to hear my grandmother whine about what she had just paid for her new Buick when Venie was never likely to own so nice,or so new, a vehicle. I was never explicitly told, by my grandmother or anyone else, not to discuss such things in Venie's presence. It was just sort of unspoken law, a kind of good manners my grandmother imparted by example rather than explicit instruction. In my naivete, I assumed that this basic standard of etiquette was known and respected by everyone who had a little bit of money.
Working in New York, though, I found pretty quickly that most of the upper middle class people I met hadn't had the advantage of a grandmother like mine. As a legal assistant, I had the dubious privilege of getting to hear attorneys gripe about "only" getting a $60,000 bonus, when my base salary was under $40,000. That colored a lot of my attitudes about the moneyed classes in New York.
Nonetheless, I like to think that my feelings about upper middle class people are based less on envy than on pure total incomprehension. After a while, I didn't envy the attorneys with the $60,000 bonuses, because I saw pretty keenly what kind of life they were forced to live in order to get them--a life I decided pretty quickly wasn't for me. But I never did understand how people making $300,000 a year--ten times the average per capita income in New York--could claim they were "just getting by".
I comprehended even less what I saw of the tastes, manners, and worries of people in this social class. Fretting over home equity was a case in point; if someone was wealthy enough to own rather than rent (a group I saw as privileged in New York), I didn't understand why he should care whether his home was worth two million or two million two.
But the thing I really, really never understood about the upper middle class was golf.
Now, I hate sports in general. But I always particularly took to my heart the old joke about golf being a game invented by village idiots in Scotland. I tend to think one needs to be a village idiot to find enjoyment in hitting a ball into a hole, over and over and over, for four hours.
I took a certain joy, then, in reading a story in today's New York Times about the decline in popularity golf is currently experiencing. Various theories for the decline were given, but the one I liked best was that the kind of men who, a couple generations ago, might have spent every Saturday and Sunday playing golf, can't do that any more. Nowadays, these men have to take the kids to soccer, or to run errands that their non-working wives (or Venies) would have done forty years ago. Today's corporate attorney can't spend his whole weekend on the golf course because his wife can't spare him.
Or, as I prefer to think, because the Venie of today gets a better salary than my grandmother's Venie used to, and he can't afford those $2,000 golf clubs so easily.
My earliest inkling that there was a class above the one I belonged to, though, came not from school but from my own family. My father's side of the family (though not my mother's--not by a long shot) was always fairly well off (my father might have been so too had he not had found his metier in journalism). The Wilheims were not Bill Gates well off, but people who might have said they were "comfortable" and always appeared so.
When I was young, my grandmother, now of blessed memory, had a housekeeper named Venie. I recall very little about Venie save that she was black, rather heavy-set, and had apparently worked for my grandmother as far back as I, at such a young age, could imagine: my father told me that when he was little, Venie used to ask, by way of a joke, whether he wanted to see "Colored TV", and when he said "yes," would stand in front of the television set, blocking it with her ample girth. Even then, a time when people used the word "colored" to refer to people rather than laundry seemed impossibly far away in the past.
My grandmother saw herself as having an affectionate relationship with Venie and had given Venie various kinds of help over the years. I remember hearing once that, when the house Venie rented was going to be torn down and replaced with a large apartment complex, my grandmother had somehow secured for her first dibs on apartments in the new complex, for no more than she was already paying. Whether Venie held my grandmother in the same kind of affection, I cannot speculate. But to my young eyes, back then, it always seemed as though she did.
Despite her affections for Venie, or perhaps because of them, however, there were certain topics my grandmother did not discuss in front of her. Money was the chief of these subjects. My grandmother had the sense to know that Venie did not want to hear my grandmother whine about what she had just paid for her new Buick when Venie was never likely to own so nice,or so new, a vehicle. I was never explicitly told, by my grandmother or anyone else, not to discuss such things in Venie's presence. It was just sort of unspoken law, a kind of good manners my grandmother imparted by example rather than explicit instruction. In my naivete, I assumed that this basic standard of etiquette was known and respected by everyone who had a little bit of money.
Working in New York, though, I found pretty quickly that most of the upper middle class people I met hadn't had the advantage of a grandmother like mine. As a legal assistant, I had the dubious privilege of getting to hear attorneys gripe about "only" getting a $60,000 bonus, when my base salary was under $40,000. That colored a lot of my attitudes about the moneyed classes in New York.
Nonetheless, I like to think that my feelings about upper middle class people are based less on envy than on pure total incomprehension. After a while, I didn't envy the attorneys with the $60,000 bonuses, because I saw pretty keenly what kind of life they were forced to live in order to get them--a life I decided pretty quickly wasn't for me. But I never did understand how people making $300,000 a year--ten times the average per capita income in New York--could claim they were "just getting by".
I comprehended even less what I saw of the tastes, manners, and worries of people in this social class. Fretting over home equity was a case in point; if someone was wealthy enough to own rather than rent (a group I saw as privileged in New York), I didn't understand why he should care whether his home was worth two million or two million two.
But the thing I really, really never understood about the upper middle class was golf.
Now, I hate sports in general. But I always particularly took to my heart the old joke about golf being a game invented by village idiots in Scotland. I tend to think one needs to be a village idiot to find enjoyment in hitting a ball into a hole, over and over and over, for four hours.
I took a certain joy, then, in reading a story in today's New York Times about the decline in popularity golf is currently experiencing. Various theories for the decline were given, but the one I liked best was that the kind of men who, a couple generations ago, might have spent every Saturday and Sunday playing golf, can't do that any more. Nowadays, these men have to take the kids to soccer, or to run errands that their non-working wives (or Venies) would have done forty years ago. Today's corporate attorney can't spend his whole weekend on the golf course because his wife can't spare him.
Or, as I prefer to think, because the Venie of today gets a better salary than my grandmother's Venie used to, and he can't afford those $2,000 golf clubs so easily.
18 February 2008
And They Call It Yuppie Love
One nice thing about being home temporarily is that I have the ability to see movies again. Since coming home, I've seen Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, and--today--a film called Definitely, Maybe that tried to be cute but ultimately didn't deliver.
The basic premise of Definitely, Maybe, in case you've missed the eight million trailers for it, is that a little girl who has lived all her life with only her father is finally hearing the story of who her mother is. Her father decides to tell the story with names and some facts changed, so that the girl has to guess which of three women her father was involved with is her real mother. As seems to be the rule with all such movies these days, the entire story takes place in Manhattan (except for a brief bit at the end in a part of "trendy" Brooklyn that I recognized immediately as DUMBO), because we all know that human dramas don't really count off of that little island between the Hudson and East Rivers.
Died-in-the-wool Democrats, I suppose, will get a kick out of the opening bits of the movie, in which the father is involved in Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Frankly, I find this kind of realism in movies more annoying that entertaining. There was a time when the entertainment media actively avoided using the names of real politicians in entirely fictional stories. But I digress.
The truly annoying things about this movie, to me, were, first, that its whole context is so heavily Manhattan Yuppie; and second, that it left a couple gaping holes that needed resolution. The father goes from being first in his class at UW-Madison to a low-level Clinton staffer to a prominent political consultant to an advertising executive. With one notable exception, the other characters in the movie have similar career projections. Generally, I have difficulty getting wrapped up in the problems or "problems" of people in these kinds of income groups.
Gaping holes also abound in the movie. Without giving anything away, let me say that, in the end, I found it implausible that the identity of this child's mother would have been hidden from her in the first place. There are really only two situations in which I can conceive of a child's not being told the identity of its mother: when the mother abandoned the father and the child shortly after the child's birth, or when the mother is in some way reprobrate or notorious. Neither of these cases applied here.
Nonetheless, I always do get a certain joy out of seeing New York in the movies. I find I have an entirely different relationship to New York movies when I can say, "Oh...I know right where that is!" And on that, Definitely, Maybe delivered.
The basic premise of Definitely, Maybe, in case you've missed the eight million trailers for it, is that a little girl who has lived all her life with only her father is finally hearing the story of who her mother is. Her father decides to tell the story with names and some facts changed, so that the girl has to guess which of three women her father was involved with is her real mother. As seems to be the rule with all such movies these days, the entire story takes place in Manhattan (except for a brief bit at the end in a part of "trendy" Brooklyn that I recognized immediately as DUMBO), because we all know that human dramas don't really count off of that little island between the Hudson and East Rivers.
Died-in-the-wool Democrats, I suppose, will get a kick out of the opening bits of the movie, in which the father is involved in Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Frankly, I find this kind of realism in movies more annoying that entertaining. There was a time when the entertainment media actively avoided using the names of real politicians in entirely fictional stories. But I digress.
The truly annoying things about this movie, to me, were, first, that its whole context is so heavily Manhattan Yuppie; and second, that it left a couple gaping holes that needed resolution. The father goes from being first in his class at UW-Madison to a low-level Clinton staffer to a prominent political consultant to an advertising executive. With one notable exception, the other characters in the movie have similar career projections. Generally, I have difficulty getting wrapped up in the problems or "problems" of people in these kinds of income groups.
Gaping holes also abound in the movie. Without giving anything away, let me say that, in the end, I found it implausible that the identity of this child's mother would have been hidden from her in the first place. There are really only two situations in which I can conceive of a child's not being told the identity of its mother: when the mother abandoned the father and the child shortly after the child's birth, or when the mother is in some way reprobrate or notorious. Neither of these cases applied here.
Nonetheless, I always do get a certain joy out of seeing New York in the movies. I find I have an entirely different relationship to New York movies when I can say, "Oh...I know right where that is!" And on that, Definitely, Maybe delivered.
17 February 2008
When Banging on the Door Just Isn't Enough...
Today, I took at look at the website of the Moscow Times, one of Russia's leading English-language papers. On it, I found this fascinating little article:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2008/02/15/015.html
Apparently, a court somewhere in Siberia actually had to intervene to settle disputes over bathroom use in a komunalka (communal apartment). The court ordered each party to spend no more than 20 minutes in the bathroom.
The Russian press seems as mystified by this ruling as I am, given how impossible it would be to enforce. But I sort of have to admire them for trying. If I had been able to go to to court to get access to the bathroom at my place in Washington Heights, I would never have moved to Brooklyn.
In the long run, I figure this one will rank right up there with the Italian court that decided a woman can't be found to have been raped if she was wearing blue jeans at the time.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2008/02/15/015.html
Apparently, a court somewhere in Siberia actually had to intervene to settle disputes over bathroom use in a komunalka (communal apartment). The court ordered each party to spend no more than 20 minutes in the bathroom.
The Russian press seems as mystified by this ruling as I am, given how impossible it would be to enforce. But I sort of have to admire them for trying. If I had been able to go to to court to get access to the bathroom at my place in Washington Heights, I would never have moved to Brooklyn.
In the long run, I figure this one will rank right up there with the Italian court that decided a woman can't be found to have been raped if she was wearing blue jeans at the time.
16 February 2008
Have Your Girl Call My Girl
Another little tidbit about Russian forms of address, one I remember from my Russian class:
Russian women really, really have no choice but to put up with being called "girl," even well into their fifties. The Russian word for girl, dyebushka, is used for not just for little girls but for women of almost all ages.
There is, of course, a perfectly adequate word for woman, zhensheena, in Russian. But any woman who demands to be called the more grown-up word, as millions of American women have done since the 1970s, would encounter a serious problem. In Russian language and culture, to say "I'm not a girl, I'm a woman" comes across as "I'm not a girl, I'm a slut." So there really is no way out for a Russian feminist.
Dyebushka is also occasionally used in direct address as well.
Russian women really, really have no choice but to put up with being called "girl," even well into their fifties. The Russian word for girl, dyebushka, is used for not just for little girls but for women of almost all ages.
There is, of course, a perfectly adequate word for woman, zhensheena, in Russian. But any woman who demands to be called the more grown-up word, as millions of American women have done since the 1970s, would encounter a serious problem. In Russian language and culture, to say "I'm not a girl, I'm a woman" comes across as "I'm not a girl, I'm a slut." So there really is no way out for a Russian feminist.
Dyebushka is also occasionally used in direct address as well.
Me, a Name I Call Myself
In addition to trying to learn something of Russian etiquette and culture, I am also trying to revive the smattering of Russian I was able to learn at Columbia.
So far (only one lesson into my Teach Yourself Russian book), this is proving easier than I had anticipated. I find that the alphabet is coming back to me readily, though it will take some practice to remember that the equivalent of a lower-case "p" in Russian handwriting looks not like a pi sign (as do the printed versions of the letter "p"), but like an English lower-case "n". Similarly, it hasn't taken long to get expressions like kak dyela ("how are you doing"), da svedanya (goodbye), or pozhalyusta ("please") back in my consciousness.
Like most language course, my Teach Yourself Russian course moves pretty swiftly into introductions. Now, here is an interesting subject for linguistic investigation: in Russian, you introduce yourself by saying menya zovoot [name]", which translates literally as "Me is called [name]." In French, it's je m'appelle--"I call myself". And in English, we prefer "My name is" or "I'm....".
So, just among these three languages (chosen largely because they're the three in which I've been exposed to and can remember this information), we have four possible ways of saying your name:
1) Name as something you are ("I'm So and So")
2) Name as something you have or possess ("My name's")
3) Name as something you use of yourself ("I call myself")
4) Name as something others use for you or give to you ("Me is called")
So here's my question: why we we all--not just we Anglophones, but Francophones, Russophones, and the rest of humanity--get into such narrow preferences about this? The equivalents of these forms can be made in any of the above languages (though somewhat trickier in Russian, as I'm not sure Russian has a word for a name in general that is used of persons, as opposed to first name, patronymic, or last name). All of these forms would be comprehensible to a speaker of any of these languages. And yet speakers of all of these languages would think less of someone who used the wrong form for that language.
These kinds of questions about language interest me more and more.
So far (only one lesson into my Teach Yourself Russian book), this is proving easier than I had anticipated. I find that the alphabet is coming back to me readily, though it will take some practice to remember that the equivalent of a lower-case "p" in Russian handwriting looks not like a pi sign (as do the printed versions of the letter "p"), but like an English lower-case "n". Similarly, it hasn't taken long to get expressions like kak dyela ("how are you doing"), da svedanya (goodbye), or pozhalyusta ("please") back in my consciousness.
Like most language course, my Teach Yourself Russian course moves pretty swiftly into introductions. Now, here is an interesting subject for linguistic investigation: in Russian, you introduce yourself by saying menya zovoot [name]", which translates literally as "Me is called [name]." In French, it's je m'appelle--"I call myself". And in English, we prefer "My name is" or "I'm....".
So, just among these three languages (chosen largely because they're the three in which I've been exposed to and can remember this information), we have four possible ways of saying your name:
1) Name as something you are ("I'm So and So")
2) Name as something you have or possess ("My name's")
3) Name as something you use of yourself ("I call myself")
4) Name as something others use for you or give to you ("Me is called")
So here's my question: why we we all--not just we Anglophones, but Francophones, Russophones, and the rest of humanity--get into such narrow preferences about this? The equivalents of these forms can be made in any of the above languages (though somewhat trickier in Russian, as I'm not sure Russian has a word for a name in general that is used of persons, as opposed to first name, patronymic, or last name). All of these forms would be comprehensible to a speaker of any of these languages. And yet speakers of all of these languages would think less of someone who used the wrong form for that language.
These kinds of questions about language interest me more and more.
Gotcha, Gazposhka!
Now that Russia is beginning to seem like something that is really going to happen, I've started making an effort to read up more on the country. It's not as if I knew nothing about Russia before, but I feel it's important to get a sense of manners and mores before I commit any major social faux pas (something I wish I'd done before leaving for Taiwan).
Some of what I am finding out is very useful. For instance, Russia has a very specific etiquette of giving flowers. Flowers are generally given to teachers by pupils on the first day of school (where Russian teachers find to put all these flowers in cramped Russian apartments, I have no idea) and by guests to the hostess when dining in someone's home. So far so good. But it's also important not to give flowers in even numbers, because in Russian culture this is associated with funerals.
Other advice I'm able to find out is more mystifying than helpful. The big case in point is the use of titles (or rather, Russian's general lack thereof). Contrary to the impression you might get watching 007 movies, Russians never actually did go around addressing each other as tovarishsch/tovarishka (comrade)--it was only used in a minor number of bureaucratic contexts, and occasionally to get the attention of a stranger--and now that the Cold War is over, it's not used at all. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the preferred terms were gaspodin/gasposhka, roughly equivalent to the English Mr. and Mrs. They have made something of a comeback since the end of communism, but not without controvery: their literal translation is "master" and "mistress". Given Russia's history with serfdom, it's not surprising that some people will, apparently, take great offense and, when call this, retort, "I'm nobody's gaspodin!"
In many contexts, including--I gather--the classroom, the preferred form of formal address is to use first name and ochestva (patronymic). For those who don't know, a Russian will have three names: his first name, his last name, and his patronymic, a name derived from the name of his or her father. One guidebook to Russian culture indicated that, in the universities, professors and students always address each other by first name and patryonymic, and I would not be at all surprised if this held true in private language schools as well. Nonetheless, this can be problematic when doing introduction games, because it is necessary to teach students how to introduce each other politely in English. I wonder how one explains to people with a low level of English that Americans don't have patronymics.
Incidentally, while viewing Doctor Zhivago last night, I was amazed to find that the movie possibly got this aspect of Russian etiquette wrong in at least one place. During an early scene set in a lavish pre-Revolutionary restaurant, Lara Antipova at one point addresses Komarovsky as "Monsieur Komarovsky", to which he replies, "Why not Viktor Ippolitovich?" A real-life scene of this kind would start with first name and patronymic, proceed to first name without the patronyimic, and from there move on to diminutive forms. I should be careful before pronouncing harsh judgment on the scriptwriters of Zhivago, however, as much of the film was set in Tsarist times, and this scene may adequate express the usage of 1913.
Nonetheless, there is at least one attested used of the diminutive even in the formal context of international diplomacy: when Bill Clinton met with Vladimir Putin shortly before leaving office, he called him Volodya.
But I digress.
Because of the problems with tovarischch/tovarishka and gaspodin/gaspozhka, knowing how to address strangers on the metro has become particularly problematic. There are no Russian equivalents of sir, miss, madam, or ma'am. Unable to used tovarishch/tovarishka or gaspodin/gaspozhka, post-communist Russians are often forced to be very rude when, say, telling the woman in front of you that she has dropped a glove. Resort must be had to expressions like, "Hey you there, with the red scarf." When New Yorkers do this, it's just ill-breeding; when Muscovites do it, it's under duress.
Some of what I am finding out is very useful. For instance, Russia has a very specific etiquette of giving flowers. Flowers are generally given to teachers by pupils on the first day of school (where Russian teachers find to put all these flowers in cramped Russian apartments, I have no idea) and by guests to the hostess when dining in someone's home. So far so good. But it's also important not to give flowers in even numbers, because in Russian culture this is associated with funerals.
Other advice I'm able to find out is more mystifying than helpful. The big case in point is the use of titles (or rather, Russian's general lack thereof). Contrary to the impression you might get watching 007 movies, Russians never actually did go around addressing each other as tovarishsch/tovarishka (comrade)--it was only used in a minor number of bureaucratic contexts, and occasionally to get the attention of a stranger--and now that the Cold War is over, it's not used at all. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the preferred terms were gaspodin/gasposhka, roughly equivalent to the English Mr. and Mrs. They have made something of a comeback since the end of communism, but not without controvery: their literal translation is "master" and "mistress". Given Russia's history with serfdom, it's not surprising that some people will, apparently, take great offense and, when call this, retort, "I'm nobody's gaspodin!"
In many contexts, including--I gather--the classroom, the preferred form of formal address is to use first name and ochestva (patronymic). For those who don't know, a Russian will have three names: his first name, his last name, and his patronymic, a name derived from the name of his or her father. One guidebook to Russian culture indicated that, in the universities, professors and students always address each other by first name and patryonymic, and I would not be at all surprised if this held true in private language schools as well. Nonetheless, this can be problematic when doing introduction games, because it is necessary to teach students how to introduce each other politely in English. I wonder how one explains to people with a low level of English that Americans don't have patronymics.
Incidentally, while viewing Doctor Zhivago last night, I was amazed to find that the movie possibly got this aspect of Russian etiquette wrong in at least one place. During an early scene set in a lavish pre-Revolutionary restaurant, Lara Antipova at one point addresses Komarovsky as "Monsieur Komarovsky", to which he replies, "Why not Viktor Ippolitovich?" A real-life scene of this kind would start with first name and patronymic, proceed to first name without the patronyimic, and from there move on to diminutive forms. I should be careful before pronouncing harsh judgment on the scriptwriters of Zhivago, however, as much of the film was set in Tsarist times, and this scene may adequate express the usage of 1913.
Nonetheless, there is at least one attested used of the diminutive even in the formal context of international diplomacy: when Bill Clinton met with Vladimir Putin shortly before leaving office, he called him Volodya.
But I digress.
Because of the problems with tovarischch/tovarishka and gaspodin/gaspozhka, knowing how to address strangers on the metro has become particularly problematic. There are no Russian equivalents of sir, miss, madam, or ma'am. Unable to used tovarishch/tovarishka or gaspodin/gaspozhka, post-communist Russians are often forced to be very rude when, say, telling the woman in front of you that she has dropped a glove. Resort must be had to expressions like, "Hey you there, with the red scarf." When New Yorkers do this, it's just ill-breeding; when Muscovites do it, it's under duress.
14 February 2008
Where's Dick Clark When You Need Him?
My recent searches for good music to use in an EFL classroom got me thinking a bit this morning, and I came up with what I think will be a good lesson to use with teenagers.
This lesson would begin by finding an old picture of kids dancing on one of the eight zillion dance shows that have been on TV over the years. My preference would be to use a picture from the Ur of all these shows, American Bandstand itself, because the kids would no doubt be dressed in outfits teenagers don't wear anymore, and it could be used to practice or elicit the form "used to", or at least a past-tense form that could be used to teach the form "used to".
From there, I could find (or make up) some kind of short text about American Bandstand--things about when and how it started, how long it was on TV, how many people watched it, etc. This could be a good reading comprehension activity.
This would then segue into a writing activity. I would explain that there's going to be a new American Bandstand (I could weave this into a text I wrote myself), and that they were going to compete to be on it. I could match up boys and girls and have them write a letter saying why they want to be on Bandstand. Or it could be an individual activity. Students would eventually present their letters to the class, followed by critique by me and their peers. At the end, I could announce a winner.
With this lesson plan in mind, I went looking for a picture of kids dancing on American Bandstand and couldn't find a good one. What pictures I could fnd were all too small and grainy to used in the classroom. I'd also like to find a picture in color (kids and teens don't seem to respond well to anything in black and white), but that may be hard if I wanted to use authentic period images of Bandstand.
Which made me think of another possibility: using still pictures from American Dreams, a show that was on NBC a few years back that centered around a teenage girl who was an audience member (and I think eventually a dancer) on Bandstand. This idea led to the possibility of using a video clip from the show, so I decided to look the program up on Amazon and see what a season set would cost.
This is not the first time I've looked into buying a season set of American Dreams. The last time I did it, three or four years ago, I wanted to buy it as a birthday or Father's Day gift for my father. But I thought the cost was outrageous--nearly $100--and so moved on (eventually I gave him the series set of Freaks and Geeks, which was almost as expensive).
From looking at Amazon today, I realized I don't understand at all how TV DVD sets are priced. At the time, I figured the American Dreams set was so expensive because the show had modern bands perform actual hits from the 1960s, and the show was probably spending a small (or large) fortune getting the rights to "Leader of the Pack" or "Soldier Boy" or whatever. But when I looked at the season set today, it was a mere $19.98.
Something is wrong here. If a show can be profitably sold for $19.98, I don't see how the market could ever have supported a price of $100. There seems not to be much rhyme or reason to the price of DVD season ( or series) sets.
For instance, as of this writing, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is being sold on Amazon for about $22 per season set. So to buy four seasons (so far, only seasons one through four, out of seven, have been released), a hard-core Mary Tyler Moore fan such as myself would pay about $90. At the same time, a single season of I Love Lucy goes for about $35--or you can buy a complete series set (comprising six seasons) for about $190.
This makes absolutely no sense. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was actually withdrawn from syndication in order to promote sales of the DVD sets. I Love Lucy, on the other hand, has never been off the air since it premiered in 1951--yep, that's right, every day since then, someone somewhere has gotten to see Lucy try to say "Vitameatavegamin." One would think, given these two facts, that Mary Tyler Moore sets would be more expensive than Lucy sets, since Mary Tyler Moore fans don't have other means of getting their fix.
This lesson would begin by finding an old picture of kids dancing on one of the eight zillion dance shows that have been on TV over the years. My preference would be to use a picture from the Ur of all these shows, American Bandstand itself, because the kids would no doubt be dressed in outfits teenagers don't wear anymore, and it could be used to practice or elicit the form "used to", or at least a past-tense form that could be used to teach the form "used to".
From there, I could find (or make up) some kind of short text about American Bandstand--things about when and how it started, how long it was on TV, how many people watched it, etc. This could be a good reading comprehension activity.
This would then segue into a writing activity. I would explain that there's going to be a new American Bandstand (I could weave this into a text I wrote myself), and that they were going to compete to be on it. I could match up boys and girls and have them write a letter saying why they want to be on Bandstand. Or it could be an individual activity. Students would eventually present their letters to the class, followed by critique by me and their peers. At the end, I could announce a winner.
With this lesson plan in mind, I went looking for a picture of kids dancing on American Bandstand and couldn't find a good one. What pictures I could fnd were all too small and grainy to used in the classroom. I'd also like to find a picture in color (kids and teens don't seem to respond well to anything in black and white), but that may be hard if I wanted to use authentic period images of Bandstand.
Which made me think of another possibility: using still pictures from American Dreams, a show that was on NBC a few years back that centered around a teenage girl who was an audience member (and I think eventually a dancer) on Bandstand. This idea led to the possibility of using a video clip from the show, so I decided to look the program up on Amazon and see what a season set would cost.
This is not the first time I've looked into buying a season set of American Dreams. The last time I did it, three or four years ago, I wanted to buy it as a birthday or Father's Day gift for my father. But I thought the cost was outrageous--nearly $100--and so moved on (eventually I gave him the series set of Freaks and Geeks, which was almost as expensive).
From looking at Amazon today, I realized I don't understand at all how TV DVD sets are priced. At the time, I figured the American Dreams set was so expensive because the show had modern bands perform actual hits from the 1960s, and the show was probably spending a small (or large) fortune getting the rights to "Leader of the Pack" or "Soldier Boy" or whatever. But when I looked at the season set today, it was a mere $19.98.
Something is wrong here. If a show can be profitably sold for $19.98, I don't see how the market could ever have supported a price of $100. There seems not to be much rhyme or reason to the price of DVD season ( or series) sets.
For instance, as of this writing, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is being sold on Amazon for about $22 per season set. So to buy four seasons (so far, only seasons one through four, out of seven, have been released), a hard-core Mary Tyler Moore fan such as myself would pay about $90. At the same time, a single season of I Love Lucy goes for about $35--or you can buy a complete series set (comprising six seasons) for about $190.
This makes absolutely no sense. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was actually withdrawn from syndication in order to promote sales of the DVD sets. I Love Lucy, on the other hand, has never been off the air since it premiered in 1951--yep, that's right, every day since then, someone somewhere has gotten to see Lucy try to say "Vitameatavegamin." One would think, given these two facts, that Mary Tyler Moore sets would be more expensive than Lucy sets, since Mary Tyler Moore fans don't have other means of getting their fix.
The Profession of Good Health
I don't consider myself an especially lucky person, but every so often, good luck strikes me as it does most people from time to time. And as with everyone else, good luck often disguises itself as bad.
The last stroke of luck I had occurred last Thursday night. I went to the grocery store a little after 10:00 to pick up a few items we needed. On the way home, I was driving along one of Wichita's main drags when, in the pitch dark, I failed to see where a lane ended and accidentally drove up onto a stretch of curb, going about thirty miles an hour. At first, I thought I had just suffered a minor annoyance and continued to drive on. But after a while, I heard a constant thud thud thud and figured I must have had a flat. I pulled over and, sure enough, found the right front wheel of the car completely deflated.
I called my mother, who came out and arranged for a tow truck. We waited. And waited. And waited. For three hours. Until a towing service came and looked at the wheel. It was out of alignment and would have to be taken in for repairs, though I was told it could be driven for about a day on the spare. Great, I thought. Just my luck.
Well, in fact it was. Because the next day, as I was driving into central Wichita to an auto body shop, I spotted an ad on the marquee of the Orpheum, an old movie theatre that has had a revival as a theatre and occasional venue for viewings of classic films. The Orpheum would be showing Doctor Zhivago on Valentine's Day evening. And so, tomorrow night, I am going to get to see one of my favorite films in the threatre for the first time.
Many people, including regular readers of this blog, have asked me why I don't pursue a career in writing. Whenever I'm asked the question, I always think of Yuri Zhivago, the poet who chose to pursue a career in medicine, because he considered poetry "no more a profession than good health." I suppose that's close to my attitude. Writing never seemed practical--or at least, there never seemed to be a practical way to pursue it. To be a writer, one really needs a day job.
I suppose Yuri Zhivago's protestation can be understood in two ways. The first, as outlined above, is the more literal reading. But the less literal reading is that, for the writer, writing becomes as indispensible as good health. Keeping this blog has begun to show me that. I am on a much better emotional keel when I am writing regularly than when I am not. I ought to try to learn from this and keep the words coming, even in the hardest and the worst of times. But I tend not to.
Part of the reason for this is that, as a legal assistant, I was stuck doing work that just drained every drop of energy out of me by the end of the day. An hour of commuting on the subway--particularly when it involved the G--didn't help, either. And in a weird way, unemployment was worse for my motivation to write. There just was nothing to say, or so it seemed. What could I possibly have to say about being twentysomething, sporadically employed, and overwhelmed in New York City, that had not already been said before--or that would not be a total turn-off to anyone who might chance to read it?
I am learning, though, that our daily lives often hold more interest to others than we realize. Every day, there is a chance of something interesting happening to us, even if it's only seeing a beloved movie advertised on the marquee of a local theatre. Moreover, the very act of writing down these little moments in life almost compels us to examine the attitudes and feelings behind them--to strip away the husk of self-abnegation we surround ourselves with, that we might lay bare the the kernel of insight of which we are capable.
And surely that merits the name of "profession" at least as much as examining paramecea under a microscope.
The last stroke of luck I had occurred last Thursday night. I went to the grocery store a little after 10:00 to pick up a few items we needed. On the way home, I was driving along one of Wichita's main drags when, in the pitch dark, I failed to see where a lane ended and accidentally drove up onto a stretch of curb, going about thirty miles an hour. At first, I thought I had just suffered a minor annoyance and continued to drive on. But after a while, I heard a constant thud thud thud and figured I must have had a flat. I pulled over and, sure enough, found the right front wheel of the car completely deflated.
I called my mother, who came out and arranged for a tow truck. We waited. And waited. And waited. For three hours. Until a towing service came and looked at the wheel. It was out of alignment and would have to be taken in for repairs, though I was told it could be driven for about a day on the spare. Great, I thought. Just my luck.
Well, in fact it was. Because the next day, as I was driving into central Wichita to an auto body shop, I spotted an ad on the marquee of the Orpheum, an old movie theatre that has had a revival as a theatre and occasional venue for viewings of classic films. The Orpheum would be showing Doctor Zhivago on Valentine's Day evening. And so, tomorrow night, I am going to get to see one of my favorite films in the threatre for the first time.
Many people, including regular readers of this blog, have asked me why I don't pursue a career in writing. Whenever I'm asked the question, I always think of Yuri Zhivago, the poet who chose to pursue a career in medicine, because he considered poetry "no more a profession than good health." I suppose that's close to my attitude. Writing never seemed practical--or at least, there never seemed to be a practical way to pursue it. To be a writer, one really needs a day job.
I suppose Yuri Zhivago's protestation can be understood in two ways. The first, as outlined above, is the more literal reading. But the less literal reading is that, for the writer, writing becomes as indispensible as good health. Keeping this blog has begun to show me that. I am on a much better emotional keel when I am writing regularly than when I am not. I ought to try to learn from this and keep the words coming, even in the hardest and the worst of times. But I tend not to.
Part of the reason for this is that, as a legal assistant, I was stuck doing work that just drained every drop of energy out of me by the end of the day. An hour of commuting on the subway--particularly when it involved the G--didn't help, either. And in a weird way, unemployment was worse for my motivation to write. There just was nothing to say, or so it seemed. What could I possibly have to say about being twentysomething, sporadically employed, and overwhelmed in New York City, that had not already been said before--or that would not be a total turn-off to anyone who might chance to read it?
I am learning, though, that our daily lives often hold more interest to others than we realize. Every day, there is a chance of something interesting happening to us, even if it's only seeing a beloved movie advertised on the marquee of a local theatre. Moreover, the very act of writing down these little moments in life almost compels us to examine the attitudes and feelings behind them--to strip away the husk of self-abnegation we surround ourselves with, that we might lay bare the the kernel of insight of which we are capable.
And surely that merits the name of "profession" at least as much as examining paramecea under a microscope.
12 February 2008
Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?
During my stay in Taiwan, and since coming home, I haven't spent as much time listening to my iPod as I did before my adventures abroad began.
Part of that, I know, is due to wear-off of novelty. I got my iPod in February or March of last year, largely because I was sick of being the only person my age on the subway without one. I quickly became addicted to it; there's just something magical about carrying your whole music collection around you, to be able to bathe yourself in Enya or the Andrews Sisters or anything else you like and drown out the noise of the wider world. For quite a while, my iPod and I were inseperable, to the point that I would even come into synagogue with my earphones around my neck (this was not so much a flouting of synagogue convention as a lack of anywhere else to put them).
The other part of that was being suddenly relieved of having to use New York City transit. Before I got my iPod, I often felt as if I had never known a quiet subway ride. My iPod allowed me to tune out the beggars, the break dancers, the candy bar barkers, in a way my half-hearted attempts at subway reading never had. But in Taiwan, I never felt any great need to tune out. My apartment was a mere two blocks from school, and even when I was on the bus or the subway, I found the Taiwanese were seldom noisy in transit.
Before I left for Taiwan, though, I loaded up my iPod with songs I thought would be useful for adult listening exercises. Picking a good song for ESL/EFL purposes is no easy task. A song that seems simple enough to a native speaker may not be so to someone learning English. Generally speaking, I have a few rules that I apply to songs for EFL:
1) No instrumentals, for obvious reasons--although some light instrumental music may be useful as background music while students work on something not related to the music itself. Nonetheless, an EFL classroom is not the place to try to create a love of Mozart.
2) No mushy love songs. Not because I don't like mushy love songs, but because they're not terribly useful for EFL purposes. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" may have gotten the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but it lacks any vocabulary or language structures that are useful in an EFL setting.
3) Ideally, the song should have a narrative of sorts. It doesn't have to be a very complicated narrative (I once observed an excellent lesson done using "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles), but it should have at least some identifiable story. The narrative aspect can be used in various ways--having students act out the song, or having students guess what will happen next after each verse.
4) Really fast songs should be avoided. ELLs (jargon for English Language Learners) tend to think English is spoken at warp speed. From my experience watching French videos in high school, I think this perception is universal among students of any foreign language, and in no way reflects at all on English in particular. But nonethless, most EFL students are not remotely ready to be exposed to Snoop Doggy Dogg.
5) Similarly, it's good to avoid songs that are way too slow. Adults often take English classes early in the morning, just after getting up, or late at night, after a long day at work. Any song that will likely put students to sleep should be avoided. "Casey Would Waltz with the Strawberry Blonde" won't do.
6) The song should have a clearly repeated refrain, since this creates one element students can sort of look ahead to if they're lost. This is good for doing a kind of prediction exercise, in which students first try to fill in a lyric sheet with words missing before they hear the actual song to check their predictions.
7) Humor is desirable. But it has to be the right type of humor--a kind that isn't dependent on cultural references or contexts students are unlikely to know. This would probably ban Weird Al Yankovic and the Capitol Steps from the EFL classroom. Even "Henry the Eighth" may be too out of context (at least in Asia, where students aren't as likely to have heard of the historical Henry VIII and won't get the joke).
8) Songs that use overly complex vocabulary are out. This eliminates a lot of songs I might want to use for their cultural value, but that are just too complex for most EFL classrooms. I would love to introduce people to Dinah Shore's rendition of "Buttons and Bows", but I also know it's better not to get the class mired with lines like "My bones denounce the buckboard bounce" or "I'l love you in buckskin and shirts that I've homespun". Similarly, "Mairzy Doats" may be amusing to American children, but I think EFL students would only get confused trying to piece out a line like "A kiddledee divy doo, wouldn't you?"
9) Similarly, songs with a lot of extremely complex metaphors are out, at least at lower levels. "I am a Walrus" is not a statement beginning EFL students need to contemplate.
10) Ideally--I would say, most importantly--a song needs to be usable to teach an identifiable chunk of language--be it a set of vocabulary or a grammatical structure.
Today, I did a little thinking about songs I could use well in an EFL setting. My repertoire so far includes the following, which all seem to meet most if not all of the criteria:
"And Then He Kissed Me" by the Crystals. I actually saw this used in one of Shane's textbooks aimed at teenagers. Good for teaching reported speech, and has a narrative that students can put into the right order.
"Come a Little Bit Closer", by Jay and the Americans. Fast but not too fast, tells a humorous story that is relatable probably anywhere outside of Saudi Arabia, and has a line suitable for introducing or reviewing the causal infinitive ("I heard the guitar player say 'Vamoose, Jose's on his way.'").
"Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree." Good for teaching use of indirect objects without direct objects ("I wrote my mother, I wrote my father, and now I'm writing you, too").
"If I Had a Million Dollars", by the Barenaked Ladies. Practically an EFL classic at this point because it is catchy, relatable to students' own lives (everyone can at least imagine being rich). Good for the second conditional. Lacking in narrative, and has only one concept (Kraft Dinner) that requires cultural explanation.
"It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To." Excellent narrative, vocabulary is not too complicated. The significance of "wearing his ring" requires a great deal of cultural translation not just to EFL students, but to anyone under 45 or so.
"Judy in Disguise." Good for some review of clothing and appearance vocabulary.
"On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe." This Judy Garland gem from the film The Harvey Girls is great for train-related vocabulary and gives the opportunity to present some American cultural context without being too alien or overwhelming. I imagine this will be great in Russia, where people still travel long distances by train and students can readily brainstorm about their most recent train trip. Also has a great line that can be used for introducing the use of would for repeated actions in the past ("I would lean across my window sill, and hear the whistle echoing across the hill"). I have a simplified, recorded version; the actual version from the film, unfortunately, has lines like "I was the Lillian Russell of Cherryville, Kansas" and "We're a couple of schoolmarms from Grand Rapids, Mich / but reading, writing 'rithemetic were not our dish").
"Swinging on a Star", the song Bing Brosby made famous by singing in Going My Way. A good song for use or practice of the second conditional, as well as animal and body vocabulary ("A mule is an animal with long, funny ears").
"Vacation" by Connie Francis (not to be confused with "Vacation" by the Go-Gos). Not a lot of really exciting vocab or structures, but good for introducing the topic of vacations (EFL students spend an inordinate amount of time planning imaginary trips to exotic locales, to practice geography vocab) or as a way of winding up a class about vacation activities or the above-mentioned geography practice.
Part of that, I know, is due to wear-off of novelty. I got my iPod in February or March of last year, largely because I was sick of being the only person my age on the subway without one. I quickly became addicted to it; there's just something magical about carrying your whole music collection around you, to be able to bathe yourself in Enya or the Andrews Sisters or anything else you like and drown out the noise of the wider world. For quite a while, my iPod and I were inseperable, to the point that I would even come into synagogue with my earphones around my neck (this was not so much a flouting of synagogue convention as a lack of anywhere else to put them).
The other part of that was being suddenly relieved of having to use New York City transit. Before I got my iPod, I often felt as if I had never known a quiet subway ride. My iPod allowed me to tune out the beggars, the break dancers, the candy bar barkers, in a way my half-hearted attempts at subway reading never had. But in Taiwan, I never felt any great need to tune out. My apartment was a mere two blocks from school, and even when I was on the bus or the subway, I found the Taiwanese were seldom noisy in transit.
Before I left for Taiwan, though, I loaded up my iPod with songs I thought would be useful for adult listening exercises. Picking a good song for ESL/EFL purposes is no easy task. A song that seems simple enough to a native speaker may not be so to someone learning English. Generally speaking, I have a few rules that I apply to songs for EFL:
1) No instrumentals, for obvious reasons--although some light instrumental music may be useful as background music while students work on something not related to the music itself. Nonetheless, an EFL classroom is not the place to try to create a love of Mozart.
2) No mushy love songs. Not because I don't like mushy love songs, but because they're not terribly useful for EFL purposes. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" may have gotten the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but it lacks any vocabulary or language structures that are useful in an EFL setting.
3) Ideally, the song should have a narrative of sorts. It doesn't have to be a very complicated narrative (I once observed an excellent lesson done using "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles), but it should have at least some identifiable story. The narrative aspect can be used in various ways--having students act out the song, or having students guess what will happen next after each verse.
4) Really fast songs should be avoided. ELLs (jargon for English Language Learners) tend to think English is spoken at warp speed. From my experience watching French videos in high school, I think this perception is universal among students of any foreign language, and in no way reflects at all on English in particular. But nonethless, most EFL students are not remotely ready to be exposed to Snoop Doggy Dogg.
5) Similarly, it's good to avoid songs that are way too slow. Adults often take English classes early in the morning, just after getting up, or late at night, after a long day at work. Any song that will likely put students to sleep should be avoided. "Casey Would Waltz with the Strawberry Blonde" won't do.
6) The song should have a clearly repeated refrain, since this creates one element students can sort of look ahead to if they're lost. This is good for doing a kind of prediction exercise, in which students first try to fill in a lyric sheet with words missing before they hear the actual song to check their predictions.
7) Humor is desirable. But it has to be the right type of humor--a kind that isn't dependent on cultural references or contexts students are unlikely to know. This would probably ban Weird Al Yankovic and the Capitol Steps from the EFL classroom. Even "Henry the Eighth" may be too out of context (at least in Asia, where students aren't as likely to have heard of the historical Henry VIII and won't get the joke).
8) Songs that use overly complex vocabulary are out. This eliminates a lot of songs I might want to use for their cultural value, but that are just too complex for most EFL classrooms. I would love to introduce people to Dinah Shore's rendition of "Buttons and Bows", but I also know it's better not to get the class mired with lines like "My bones denounce the buckboard bounce" or "I'l love you in buckskin and shirts that I've homespun". Similarly, "Mairzy Doats" may be amusing to American children, but I think EFL students would only get confused trying to piece out a line like "A kiddledee divy doo, wouldn't you?"
9) Similarly, songs with a lot of extremely complex metaphors are out, at least at lower levels. "I am a Walrus" is not a statement beginning EFL students need to contemplate.
10) Ideally--I would say, most importantly--a song needs to be usable to teach an identifiable chunk of language--be it a set of vocabulary or a grammatical structure.
Today, I did a little thinking about songs I could use well in an EFL setting. My repertoire so far includes the following, which all seem to meet most if not all of the criteria:
"And Then He Kissed Me" by the Crystals. I actually saw this used in one of Shane's textbooks aimed at teenagers. Good for teaching reported speech, and has a narrative that students can put into the right order.
"Come a Little Bit Closer", by Jay and the Americans. Fast but not too fast, tells a humorous story that is relatable probably anywhere outside of Saudi Arabia, and has a line suitable for introducing or reviewing the causal infinitive ("I heard the guitar player say 'Vamoose, Jose's on his way.'").
"Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree." Good for teaching use of indirect objects without direct objects ("I wrote my mother, I wrote my father, and now I'm writing you, too").
"If I Had a Million Dollars", by the Barenaked Ladies. Practically an EFL classic at this point because it is catchy, relatable to students' own lives (everyone can at least imagine being rich). Good for the second conditional. Lacking in narrative, and has only one concept (Kraft Dinner) that requires cultural explanation.
"It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To." Excellent narrative, vocabulary is not too complicated. The significance of "wearing his ring" requires a great deal of cultural translation not just to EFL students, but to anyone under 45 or so.
"Judy in Disguise." Good for some review of clothing and appearance vocabulary.
"On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe." This Judy Garland gem from the film The Harvey Girls is great for train-related vocabulary and gives the opportunity to present some American cultural context without being too alien or overwhelming. I imagine this will be great in Russia, where people still travel long distances by train and students can readily brainstorm about their most recent train trip. Also has a great line that can be used for introducing the use of would for repeated actions in the past ("I would lean across my window sill, and hear the whistle echoing across the hill"). I have a simplified, recorded version; the actual version from the film, unfortunately, has lines like "I was the Lillian Russell of Cherryville, Kansas" and "We're a couple of schoolmarms from Grand Rapids, Mich / but reading, writing 'rithemetic were not our dish").
"Swinging on a Star", the song Bing Brosby made famous by singing in Going My Way. A good song for use or practice of the second conditional, as well as animal and body vocabulary ("A mule is an animal with long, funny ears").
"Vacation" by Connie Francis (not to be confused with "Vacation" by the Go-Gos). Not a lot of really exciting vocab or structures, but good for introducing the topic of vacations (EFL students spend an inordinate amount of time planning imaginary trips to exotic locales, to practice geography vocab) or as a way of winding up a class about vacation activities or the above-mentioned geography practice.
11 February 2008
The Schmear Factor, Explained
I took a look at my blog last night to fnd that part of my carefully crafted piece about global English had been cut out by Blogger. I guess there is some kind of word limit for individual blog posts, and I had exceded it.
Unfortunately, what was cut really was necessary to understand the point, so I will include it here:
For those of you who aren't from New York, in that fair city, the word schmear is often used to denote a small amount of cream cheese spread on a bagel. This usage is particularly entrenched among Upper West Side Jews (and I imagine Upper East Side Jews, but I never really knew anyone on that side of the park). Now, this strikes me as a strange word for English to pick up. Its utility is limited by two main factors:
1) It is used only of cream cheese. One doesn't request a schmear of butter, peanut butter, or anything else on one's bagel. The word tends to be used on its own, to mean only "a small amount of cream cheese" ("I'd like a pumpernickel bagel with a schmear, please") or to indicate that you want a small amount of cream cheese after having ordered your bagel ("Just a schmear").
2) The word doesn't collocate with other food products. Schmears are as firmly tied to bagels as lox.
Now, it is true that in New York English, schmear has at least a couple of other senses:
1) It can mean "everything" (as in, "give me the whole schmear," roughly meaning, "give me the whole Megilla" or "give me the whole kit and kaboodle"). In this sense, it's even less clear why New Yorkers feel a need to add schmear to our vocabulary. Everything will do just as well a lot of the time, and even when we want to be emphatic, we have a host of other idioms at our disposals already.
2) In the ever-so-honest world of New York real estate, a schmear refers to a quick patch-up job done on a house or apartment intended to hide deeper, underlying flaws--for instance, painting walls to hide extensive water damage. Here, the word may actually have greater real utility, but one can imagine patch-up and patch-over--the terms probably used by this for disreputable real estate agents elsewhere in America--being used by New Yorkers if schmear were not available.
Local versions of English, from what I've read, seem to abound in words like schmear, words that express local cultural phenomena (such as the enthusiastic consumption of bagels by New York Jews) that don't happen elsewhere. In some varities of English, the number of such words can run into the thousands. To give a sense of this, I would ask current or former New Yorkers to consider trying to explain to your cousin from Duluth such words as egg cream, alcove studio, express, medallion cab, or knish.
Added together, all of these multifarious colorful local words could have the potential to render local varities of English mutually unintelligible. This is what I call the schmear factor.
Unfortunately, what was cut really was necessary to understand the point, so I will include it here:
For those of you who aren't from New York, in that fair city, the word schmear is often used to denote a small amount of cream cheese spread on a bagel. This usage is particularly entrenched among Upper West Side Jews (and I imagine Upper East Side Jews, but I never really knew anyone on that side of the park). Now, this strikes me as a strange word for English to pick up. Its utility is limited by two main factors:
1) It is used only of cream cheese. One doesn't request a schmear of butter, peanut butter, or anything else on one's bagel. The word tends to be used on its own, to mean only "a small amount of cream cheese" ("I'd like a pumpernickel bagel with a schmear, please") or to indicate that you want a small amount of cream cheese after having ordered your bagel ("Just a schmear").
2) The word doesn't collocate with other food products. Schmears are as firmly tied to bagels as lox.
Now, it is true that in New York English, schmear has at least a couple of other senses:
1) It can mean "everything" (as in, "give me the whole schmear," roughly meaning, "give me the whole Megilla" or "give me the whole kit and kaboodle"). In this sense, it's even less clear why New Yorkers feel a need to add schmear to our vocabulary. Everything will do just as well a lot of the time, and even when we want to be emphatic, we have a host of other idioms at our disposals already.
2) In the ever-so-honest world of New York real estate, a schmear refers to a quick patch-up job done on a house or apartment intended to hide deeper, underlying flaws--for instance, painting walls to hide extensive water damage. Here, the word may actually have greater real utility, but one can imagine patch-up and patch-over--the terms probably used by this for disreputable real estate agents elsewhere in America--being used by New Yorkers if schmear were not available.
Local versions of English, from what I've read, seem to abound in words like schmear, words that express local cultural phenomena (such as the enthusiastic consumption of bagels by New York Jews) that don't happen elsewhere. In some varities of English, the number of such words can run into the thousands. To give a sense of this, I would ask current or former New Yorkers to consider trying to explain to your cousin from Duluth such words as egg cream, alcove studio, express, medallion cab, or knish.
Added together, all of these multifarious colorful local words could have the potential to render local varities of English mutually unintelligible. This is what I call the schmear factor.
Schmear Factor
Having made a definite decision in favor of Moscow has proven a relief. I am spared the anxiety that goes with an extended job hunt, and I find I will now have time for other things.
How much time, exactly, is a bit uncertain. Russia's visa process is likely to be both a blessing and a curse. It will be a blessing in the sense that I will definitely not have a repeat of what happened with my visa situation in Taiwan. Russia is both more straightforward and more clear in its visa procedures, so I will not be entering on the wrong visa and end up making visa runs out of Russia (which would prove difficult in any case, as Moscow is hundreds of miles from any border). But it is a curse in the sense that it could take a while.
The first step in the process is for my school to obtain what is called a Letter of Invitation, which I will submit to the nearest Russian consulate. I had a communication from the woman who handles obtaining LOIs, and she indicated there would be a letter in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure if she meant by this that she will have the letter in a couple of weeks and then send it on to my by post (which would take a couple of weeks more), or if she meant that I will have it in a couple of weeks. So as I said, timing is a little indefinite.
In the meantime, I will have the opportunity to learn a smidgin of Russian. I've bought the self-study book and CD set that had the best ratings on Amazon, and I expect it will arrive about the time my Letter of Invitation is ready (or reaches me, as the case may be). I may also look into doing an online language exchange with a Russian speaker who wants to learn English.
But until my Russian books arrive, I have free time on my hands. Today, I spent a little of that free time at the central library in Wichita, perusing through yet more books on the development of language.
Today's perusal led me to a book that dealt with, among other things, the ways the human race can deal with linguistic diversity. To give a measure of the problems linguistic diversity can at times cause, this book noted that there are now twenty languages that have official status within the European Union, and into which EU documents have to be translated. Immense problems can arise when, for instance, a document has to be translated from Finnish into Portugese, because there are few people in Europe who speak both of those languages. Sometimes, this leads to a relay solution--the document is first translated from Finnish into a minor dialect called English, and then from English into Portugese.
Translation is, of course, the main solution the human species has developed to deal with its plethora of tongues. But there are others. The creation of artificial languages like Esperanto is another. But artificial languages suffer from two main problems. The first is that a lack of native speakers would require getting people all over the world to start learning a language they cannot really hope to speak with anyone immediately. No artificial language has built up a significant core of native speakers. Even Esperanto, which counts among its native speakers George Soros, has fewer than 2,000 speakers who learned the language the way American children learn English or Russian children learn Russian.
The other major hurdle for artificial languages is that not one is as universally easy to learn as it claims. Esperanto, the most successful of artificial languages, is much similar in its syntax, phonology, and vocabulary to European than to Asian, Australian, or African tongues. Mandarin speakers, for instance, would probably find Esperanto no easier to learn than English, and far less useful, given that there fewer Esperanto speakers in the world (native and non-native) than there are Jews.
The third way of dealing with linguistic diversity, and the one most relevant to the topics of this blog, is the adoption of one naturally occuring language as a world language. This solution at least has precedents. Before becoming the preserve of the Talmud, Aramaic was spoken as a lingua franca all over the ancient Near East. Latin spread throughout the Roman Empire. And English is no spreading to lands that not only are not now, but have never, been under the Union Jack.
Observers seem to be of two minds about what is happening as people around the globe scramble to learn English. Some believe that English is killing off local languages as it slips onto tongues from Nairobi to Novosibirsk, leaving the world essentially monolingual and depriving it of much of its cultural richness. Others believe that English will simply split into several, mutually inconsistent dialects, much as Latin did after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. My experience in Taiwan showed me that, for all the enthusiasm for English there, people are far from failing to transmit Mandarin and Fujanese to the next generation. Nor can I imagine that stage would ever be reached. The languages that seem to be vanishing around the world are generally ones wtih few speakers, in isolated parts of the globe like central Africa, or ones that have been undermined by actual, as opposed to lingustic, genocide. People around the world may want their children to learn English for business, but the other languages of the world aren't about to disappear.
The other possibility--that English will divide into mutually unintelligible dialects--strikes me as equally improbable. The book I read today noted the many local flavors of English--Singlish (Singapore English), Hunglish (Hungarian English), Runglish (Russian English) and the like. The the first and most widespread, BASIC English (yes, the BASIC of BASIC English is actually an acronym), has been around since the 1930s and was at one time endorsed by such luminaries as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It consists of a mere 850 words, which, combined in various ways, can allegedly convey all of the meanings possible in standard British, American, or any other variety of English. But the description I read of it today hardly made it appear promising. Many of these combinations are intensely unwieldy, and BASIC is now largely a historical curiosity. Other simplified systems of English (most notably, Globish) have not fared better.
So is there a solution to the schmear factor? In my opinion, no. The time is not forseeable when English will be pared down this way. The trend in all languages that succeed is toward more words, more borrowing, not less.
But then, the schmear factor is not, in my opinion, a problem that truly demands a solution. Local words crop into English specifically because they fill a cultural need. Many of these words are for local food, flora, or fauna. If English survives in Taiwan, I would not at all surprised if it appropriated from Mandarin or Fujanese names for all of the foods I saw at the Jhong Li night market. Schmear seems to exist in this kind of ecosystem. Upper West Side Jews need a short, simple word for something they use so regularly and demand in such a hurry--something that isn't a mouthful (yes...go on and groan) at the local bagel shop. And perhaps, not uncoincidentally, Upper West Side Jews also feel a need for words that keep them separate from the rest of the English-speaking world.
Where does that leave the potential for English as a language of global communication? How can English retain coherence and intelligibility when words like schmear and dairy (in the sense that New Zealanders use the word, to refer to what Americans call a convenience store) abound?
The answer, I think, is in travel. The world's Anglophones come into contact with each other more and more each year, not less and less. When I took my CELTA training in New York, I took it with, among others, an Irish woman, a Minnesotan, and a lovely lady from Poland who had herself learned English as a second tongue. Somehow, we understood each other, despite using words like pants to mean different things (in British and Irish English, the word denotes what Americans call panties) and having a few local words like schmear.
So English's prospects of fulfilling the role once intended for Esperanto are good. It has a massive number of native speakers--around 500 million. For all of the reasons I have mentioned, it is unlikely to break up into mutually unintelligible dialects, even if it is peppered with words like schmear, tote, and dairy. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but on the British language, I venture to say it never shall.
How much time, exactly, is a bit uncertain. Russia's visa process is likely to be both a blessing and a curse. It will be a blessing in the sense that I will definitely not have a repeat of what happened with my visa situation in Taiwan. Russia is both more straightforward and more clear in its visa procedures, so I will not be entering on the wrong visa and end up making visa runs out of Russia (which would prove difficult in any case, as Moscow is hundreds of miles from any border). But it is a curse in the sense that it could take a while.
The first step in the process is for my school to obtain what is called a Letter of Invitation, which I will submit to the nearest Russian consulate. I had a communication from the woman who handles obtaining LOIs, and she indicated there would be a letter in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure if she meant by this that she will have the letter in a couple of weeks and then send it on to my by post (which would take a couple of weeks more), or if she meant that I will have it in a couple of weeks. So as I said, timing is a little indefinite.
In the meantime, I will have the opportunity to learn a smidgin of Russian. I've bought the self-study book and CD set that had the best ratings on Amazon, and I expect it will arrive about the time my Letter of Invitation is ready (or reaches me, as the case may be). I may also look into doing an online language exchange with a Russian speaker who wants to learn English.
But until my Russian books arrive, I have free time on my hands. Today, I spent a little of that free time at the central library in Wichita, perusing through yet more books on the development of language.
Today's perusal led me to a book that dealt with, among other things, the ways the human race can deal with linguistic diversity. To give a measure of the problems linguistic diversity can at times cause, this book noted that there are now twenty languages that have official status within the European Union, and into which EU documents have to be translated. Immense problems can arise when, for instance, a document has to be translated from Finnish into Portugese, because there are few people in Europe who speak both of those languages. Sometimes, this leads to a relay solution--the document is first translated from Finnish into a minor dialect called English, and then from English into Portugese.
Translation is, of course, the main solution the human species has developed to deal with its plethora of tongues. But there are others. The creation of artificial languages like Esperanto is another. But artificial languages suffer from two main problems. The first is that a lack of native speakers would require getting people all over the world to start learning a language they cannot really hope to speak with anyone immediately. No artificial language has built up a significant core of native speakers. Even Esperanto, which counts among its native speakers George Soros, has fewer than 2,000 speakers who learned the language the way American children learn English or Russian children learn Russian.
The other major hurdle for artificial languages is that not one is as universally easy to learn as it claims. Esperanto, the most successful of artificial languages, is much similar in its syntax, phonology, and vocabulary to European than to Asian, Australian, or African tongues. Mandarin speakers, for instance, would probably find Esperanto no easier to learn than English, and far less useful, given that there fewer Esperanto speakers in the world (native and non-native) than there are Jews.
The third way of dealing with linguistic diversity, and the one most relevant to the topics of this blog, is the adoption of one naturally occuring language as a world language. This solution at least has precedents. Before becoming the preserve of the Talmud, Aramaic was spoken as a lingua franca all over the ancient Near East. Latin spread throughout the Roman Empire. And English is no spreading to lands that not only are not now, but have never, been under the Union Jack.
Observers seem to be of two minds about what is happening as people around the globe scramble to learn English. Some believe that English is killing off local languages as it slips onto tongues from Nairobi to Novosibirsk, leaving the world essentially monolingual and depriving it of much of its cultural richness. Others believe that English will simply split into several, mutually inconsistent dialects, much as Latin did after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. My experience in Taiwan showed me that, for all the enthusiasm for English there, people are far from failing to transmit Mandarin and Fujanese to the next generation. Nor can I imagine that stage would ever be reached. The languages that seem to be vanishing around the world are generally ones wtih few speakers, in isolated parts of the globe like central Africa, or ones that have been undermined by actual, as opposed to lingustic, genocide. People around the world may want their children to learn English for business, but the other languages of the world aren't about to disappear.
The other possibility--that English will divide into mutually unintelligible dialects--strikes me as equally improbable. The book I read today noted the many local flavors of English--Singlish (Singapore English), Hunglish (Hungarian English), Runglish (Russian English) and the like. The the first and most widespread, BASIC English (yes, the BASIC of BASIC English is actually an acronym), has been around since the 1930s and was at one time endorsed by such luminaries as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It consists of a mere 850 words, which, combined in various ways, can allegedly convey all of the meanings possible in standard British, American, or any other variety of English. But the description I read of it today hardly made it appear promising. Many of these combinations are intensely unwieldy, and BASIC is now largely a historical curiosity. Other simplified systems of English (most notably, Globish) have not fared better.
So is there a solution to the schmear factor? In my opinion, no. The time is not forseeable when English will be pared down this way. The trend in all languages that succeed is toward more words, more borrowing, not less.
But then, the schmear factor is not, in my opinion, a problem that truly demands a solution. Local words crop into English specifically because they fill a cultural need. Many of these words are for local food, flora, or fauna. If English survives in Taiwan, I would not at all surprised if it appropriated from Mandarin or Fujanese names for all of the foods I saw at the Jhong Li night market. Schmear seems to exist in this kind of ecosystem. Upper West Side Jews need a short, simple word for something they use so regularly and demand in such a hurry--something that isn't a mouthful (yes...go on and groan) at the local bagel shop. And perhaps, not uncoincidentally, Upper West Side Jews also feel a need for words that keep them separate from the rest of the English-speaking world.
Where does that leave the potential for English as a language of global communication? How can English retain coherence and intelligibility when words like schmear and dairy (in the sense that New Zealanders use the word, to refer to what Americans call a convenience store) abound?
The answer, I think, is in travel. The world's Anglophones come into contact with each other more and more each year, not less and less. When I took my CELTA training in New York, I took it with, among others, an Irish woman, a Minnesotan, and a lovely lady from Poland who had herself learned English as a second tongue. Somehow, we understood each other, despite using words like pants to mean different things (in British and Irish English, the word denotes what Americans call panties) and having a few local words like schmear.
So English's prospects of fulfilling the role once intended for Esperanto are good. It has a massive number of native speakers--around 500 million. For all of the reasons I have mentioned, it is unlikely to break up into mutually unintelligible dialects, even if it is peppered with words like schmear, tote, and dairy. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but on the British language, I venture to say it never shall.
04 February 2008
Mission to Moscow
Well, it looks as if the Far East Side Minyan is heading back east.
But not to the Far East.
Thursday morning, I had a telephone interview with a major language school chain in Russia. Having learned my lesson about being too explicit on my blog regarding employers and employment, I will not say which one. But it is one of the major ones operating in the country.
I had been unsure whether the interview went well. The recruiter asked me how I would go about explaining articles to Russians. This would naturally be a big concern to any language school operating in the land of Pushkin and Putin, because Russian has no articles and Russians learning English have a difficult time learning to use English articles correctly. Somehow, I got myself tongue-tied and, despite having a thorough command of English grammar, managed to mix up definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) articles. I thought this slip would definitely sink my application.
To my surprise and delight, however, I received an e-mail Friday offering me a position in one of the school's Moscow branches. And to my greater surprise, by Saturday night I had decided to take it.
I say surprise, because the deal offered in Moscow was nowhere near as good as the deals I was starting to be offered in Korea. My pay will be $1000 per month, in Roubles, plus free accomodation, free Russian lessons, free visa support, and at least some medical costs. This is about half the pay I could get in Korea.
But I find lately that I am looking at my life in new ways. A very wise person I met in Taiwan (a regular reader of this blog, who will no doubt recognize himself in this) sort of made the point to me that life was not just the accumulation of money, but also the accumulation of experiences. And the truth is that, right now, Russia is an experience I want, while Korea is not.
There are some good possibilities of a turn in Russia leading me to places I may want to be later on. I've given a bit of thought to doing some graduate work studying the Haskalah (briefly, the period in the mid-nineteenth century when the newly emancipated Jews of Europe were forced to confront the Enlightenment). Much of the Haskalah took place in Eastern Europe. And I think the study of Russian Jewry in this period could be particularly fascinating.
The chance to learn Russian for free is also appealing. I had wanted to learn Russian when I came to Columbia, when I was a wild-eyed kid with vague dreams of reading The Brothers Karamazov in the original. But I got behind on corrections of homework and had a pretty incomprehensible Russian teacher whose native language was neither Russian nor English, but Italian. And so I promptly dropped Russian. This is a chance to pick it up again.
I expect to leave for Moscow in about a month. It will take some time for my school to issue me a letter of invitation, which is a prerequisite for obtaining a visa. Then there will be applying for the visa (hopefully by post) before I go. I gather from talking to the school that it would be at least three weeks to a month before I could find myself on an Aeroflot flight.
But not to the Far East.
Thursday morning, I had a telephone interview with a major language school chain in Russia. Having learned my lesson about being too explicit on my blog regarding employers and employment, I will not say which one. But it is one of the major ones operating in the country.
I had been unsure whether the interview went well. The recruiter asked me how I would go about explaining articles to Russians. This would naturally be a big concern to any language school operating in the land of Pushkin and Putin, because Russian has no articles and Russians learning English have a difficult time learning to use English articles correctly. Somehow, I got myself tongue-tied and, despite having a thorough command of English grammar, managed to mix up definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) articles. I thought this slip would definitely sink my application.
To my surprise and delight, however, I received an e-mail Friday offering me a position in one of the school's Moscow branches. And to my greater surprise, by Saturday night I had decided to take it.
I say surprise, because the deal offered in Moscow was nowhere near as good as the deals I was starting to be offered in Korea. My pay will be $1000 per month, in Roubles, plus free accomodation, free Russian lessons, free visa support, and at least some medical costs. This is about half the pay I could get in Korea.
But I find lately that I am looking at my life in new ways. A very wise person I met in Taiwan (a regular reader of this blog, who will no doubt recognize himself in this) sort of made the point to me that life was not just the accumulation of money, but also the accumulation of experiences. And the truth is that, right now, Russia is an experience I want, while Korea is not.
There are some good possibilities of a turn in Russia leading me to places I may want to be later on. I've given a bit of thought to doing some graduate work studying the Haskalah (briefly, the period in the mid-nineteenth century when the newly emancipated Jews of Europe were forced to confront the Enlightenment). Much of the Haskalah took place in Eastern Europe. And I think the study of Russian Jewry in this period could be particularly fascinating.
The chance to learn Russian for free is also appealing. I had wanted to learn Russian when I came to Columbia, when I was a wild-eyed kid with vague dreams of reading The Brothers Karamazov in the original. But I got behind on corrections of homework and had a pretty incomprehensible Russian teacher whose native language was neither Russian nor English, but Italian. And so I promptly dropped Russian. This is a chance to pick it up again.
I expect to leave for Moscow in about a month. It will take some time for my school to issue me a letter of invitation, which is a prerequisite for obtaining a visa. Then there will be applying for the visa (hopefully by post) before I go. I gather from talking to the school that it would be at least three weeks to a month before I could find myself on an Aeroflot flight.
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