Bulls and Flower Guardians

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is in a minor Meg Ryan romantic comedy from the mid-1990s called French Kiss. The film is a fairly conventional story about a timorous wallflower of a woman who finally comes into her own when, on a journey to France to recapture the heart of a fiance with a wandering eye, has a series of adventures with a French con-man with whom she ultimately falls in love. The con-man, played to perfection by Kevin Kline, is everything the heroine is not: he is rough around the edges, adventurous, and uninhibited about nearly everything. When the first meet, seated next to each other on a flight to Paris, he shocks her by asking very personal questions about how she lost her virginity.

Naturally, Meg Ryan replies that this is none of his business. Kline tells her that people fall into two categories with respect to losing their virginity: those who guard it like a delicate flower and those who rush to lose it "like a bull". Naturally, he insists on telling her that he lost his virginity "like a bull," at the age of twelve.

When it comes to language study, I am like a bull; I want to charge right into speaking a language. Having had experiences learning Latin, Classical Greek, and French in high school, and having taken Hebrew and a smidgin of Russian in college, I feel I have a good idea what to expect in learning a language. Some linguists have compared the world's languages to a giant machine, with a multiplicity of switches; the trick to mastering the grammar of a language is know which switches have been turned on and which have been turned off in that particular language.

My background has given me an idea of what the switches are. I may know that Russian does not have the second conditional as we have it in English, but I know that Russian must have a way of making contrary-to-fact statements in the present, and I am curious as to how Russian chooses to deal with these situations. Grammar seems like the easy part of a language to pick up; it's the slogging through dictionaries of vocabulary that becomes more tiresome, where I becomes less of a bull and more of a flower guardian.

It is thus a source of great frustration that my study of Russian is progressing rather slowly. The biggest reason I find I make little progress is that opportunities to use what I am learning are few and far between. I have found two language exchange partners with whom I have met, and with whom I hope I will eventually have many opportunities to speak in Russian. But as both of them have a much higher level of English than I have of Russian, I tend to think they get more out of our conversation sessions than I do. People who are not paid language teachers seldom want to spend their free time going over basic language tasks like practicing clothing vocabulary or ordering tickets at the train station. These, however, are the kinds of things I really need to be doing with my Russian.

My efforts to learn Russian may get harder. For about six weeks, I have been taking Russian lessons with another teacher at my school. Today, however, he told me that he wishes to end our joint class and start taking lessons on his own, as he feels he needs to go slower and consolidate what he knows. In truth, we were not truly at the same level when we signed up for a class together. He had had no previous formal instruction in Russian, although he has picked up an impressive vocabulary living with his Russian girlfriend. I think he has chosen to stop taking lessons with me because he is a bit of a flower guardian, but has sensed that I am, at heart, a bull.

For the next two weeks, my Russian teacher will unfortunately be on vacation. I cannot really blame her for going away this time of year--I am making plans to go away myself at the end of the month--but her departure has dashed my hopes of using the next two weeks to consolidate some more Russian before the hustle and bustle of the autumn EFL season begins. So I will likely not be able to begin charging head-first, like a bull, until September arrives.

None of the other teachers taking Russian lessons is at quite my level; what this means is that I may be forced to take private lessons less often, and work more on my own, instead of being in a class. To me, this is a shame, because I feel I actually benefit more when I am not the only student. Learning to speak a language, as I am realizing from my own teaching, requires a lot of practice speaking, and I find I have more motivation to do that speaking when there are multiple people to whom I can speak.