Reciting the Four Questions

Every year at Passover, Jews read what are known as the Four Questions, a part of the Hagaddah (a special scripture used in conducting the Passover meal) meant both to explain the reasons for observing Passover and to provide the stimulus for further questions about the holiday's meaning. It is traditional for the Four Questions to be read by the youngest child in the family who is old enough to speak. Often, this is a child of three or four who can recite the questions only haltingly, with numerous prompts from a parent or an older sibling. But however poor the performance may be, the adults present always praise the child profusely for his efforts.

I think about this tradition regarding the Four Questions on the rare occasions when I actually get to speak in Russian. Aside from asking for a Coca-Cola at a kiosk (small booths that serve much the purpose that gas station convenience stores do in America), my only real chances are in my twice-weekly Russian classes, when I am out with Konstantin on one of our Sunday forays in Moscow, or, even more rarely, in one of my English classes.

I do not speak Russian at length in my classes, of course. For one thing, doing so would defeat the object of the classes. For another, my school's policy forbids it, and my students pay for--and expect--English-only lessons. There are only two situations where I speak any Russian with my students.

The first is when my students, finding some task difficult to perform in English, drift into Russian. I have heard various methods suggested for dealing with this, but the one I use the most with adults is simply to say, in a tone of mocking irony, в'англййскйй, пажалуста (b'angleeskee pozhalyoosta, "in English, please"). I find this works better than any of the game-oriented ways of getting students to stop speaking Russian. Learning a foreign langauge often involves feeling like a three-year-old all over again, and not in a good way. My adult business students respond perfectly well to a simple request to speak in the language they are paying good money to learn.

The other time I speak Russian in class is when the subject of my learning Russian comes up. This has happened only a couple of times, in one-on-one situations, and usually after a student has apologized for his poor level of English. My reponse to such an apology is to tell my student his level of English is good (it almost always is), and that British and American people do not expect foreigners to use English in all of the ways we do. I tell my students I am trying to learn Russian and therefore understand how hard learning a foreign language can be.

This invariably leads to questions about what words I know and how far I have progressed. My canned response is to say, in Russian, that I am trying to learn to speak Russian but do not know very much.

It's amazing what kind of response this simple utterance can get. I am always told my Russian is very good. It isn't; the few times I have had to do such simple things as ask for directions in Russian, I understand very little of what is said and sometimes have to ask people to repeat things two or three times. But my students have invariably complimented me.

It's at this moment that the Four Questions come into play. A child reciting the Four Questions for the first time is likely nervous, as he does not want to be the center of so much attention from grown-ups; an older child who has had to do it for years is generally resentful. And if he has the chance to pass it off to an even younger child, he will jump at it.

Speaking about my Russian studies in Russian, I always feel like a three-year-old reciting the Four Questions. I manage to get the sentence out--I've repeated it to enough people now that it feels like a line from a script or, dare I say it, a Hagaddah--but it certainly doesn't feel like natural conversation. And yet, for this smidgin of Russian, I get lavish praise.

There could not be a starker contrast with how Americans often react to a foreigner who doesn't speak English well. Unless he happens to work with immigrants, or as an ESL teacher, an American is likely to treat a non-native speaker with at least condescension and at worst outright contempt. Many Americans seem to labor under a delusion that, if someone does not speak English, simply speaking more loudly to him will magically make him able to understand. I am horrified that this approach to non-English speakers persists even when Americans go abroad.

I think this dichotomy in attitudes explains a lot about my students. Volodya, the attorney I have mentioned in a previous post, has discussed with me, in English, such complicated matters as the nature of Russia's highest courts, the appointment of justices to them, and the rights criminal defendants have in the Russian judicial system (more on all of these points later). During the course of this conversation, he had only to be taught a couple of key words (plaintiff, defendant, and litigator) and to get some information from me about some differences in terminology. Yet even he apologized more than once about how "poor" his English is.