Fifteen years have passed, I only remember about the toilet

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Once I was traveling to the Far East in the same compartment with an entertaining travel companion. His name was Alain, he was nineteen years old. From France, he traveled to Moscow, following to Khabarovsk, and from there to Japan for an internship. This Alain, poor fellow, was silent for three days: no one could keep him company. Probably, fortunately, he came across me, with a weak spoken English. My parents and I sat down with him late at night. And he, after a forced verbal abstinence, somehow immediately got me talking for three whole hours.

In the morning I already knew almost all his life. I was surprised that he did not read much French writers, but that he was fluent in English and German, and that he was learning Japanese. True, later it turned out that Alain had been to England four times, four in Germany, two in Greece, and also in Spain and many other places. “Why are you surprised?” Dad asked me, “He teaches English in London, and German in Munich.” Then I began to understand that my seven years as a foreign student at school and two at the institute … it is better to keep silent about this. Because not a single normal foreigner will understand why it is impossible to learn a language in the slightest degree in nine years.

It seems to me that our linguistic atrophy has arisen partly because of the weak educational system (remember the English lessons: "my father is collective farmer"?), Partly because of the Iron Curtain, because of the old habit of being afraid of communicating with foreigners. “We don’t want to study German in a Soviet country,” our parents joked, forgetting that this is the language of Goethe, Mozart, Heine. Of course, the phobia did not extend to the intelligentsia. They say that Anna Andreevna Akhmatova at the age of thirty was horrified: she does not read Shakespeare in the original!

Well, God bless him, with our ignorant past! For two years I worked in an American car service. Our chef came from Los Angeles and often received clients. Imagine my amazement when the visitors themselves expressed themselves in good English, naming shafts, gears and steering rods, you must admit, words are rarely used in everyday speech! By the way, a Georgian worked at the service, he talked to the chief for a long time. And the Georgians not only did not know English, but also Russian by and large. In such amazing cases, gestures, facial expressions and intonation come to the rescue. And according to psychologists, when perceiving information, they pull by 53%, and the content of speech itself only by 7%. But you still need to learn languages.

After automatic memorization (many languages are solid exceptions), I consider it important to watch movies (preferably with captions) and read books. You can take the original and the translation to collate. Or write out phrases in two columns: the Russian version and the corresponding foreign one. It turns out something like a dictionary.

It is believed that children learn by playing and adults by working. In the classroom at the institute (not specialized), we often acted out scenes. If they were "fired" - they portrayed rage, if "flew on an airplane" - they lined up chairs in two rows. Moreover, the vocabulary was practiced vital. Someone whined: "I am sick" (I'm sick). Once they brought us printouts with profanity. At that moment I understood: nothing should be alien to a foreign language learner. Director Roman Viktyuk claims that when working with American actors, he used only Russian mat, and they understood what was required of them.

My mom studied Czech. And do you know what the teacher wrote on the board first? "Where is the restroom?"! Mom often told this incident to friends, and after fifteen years she remembers only … this phrase.