Phonetics, Okra, and Khokhloma

Entry 13: September 5, 2011

            Are you surprised to see another update already? You should be. Don't get used to getting a Tuesday, Wednesday run-down after such an extensive weekend.

            Tuesday's are usually pretty slow at the American Center, and this one was no real exception. I worked on my Capstone project for a good portion of the day. Later on in the day, some students approached me to help them with the skit for the Freshman Party on Friday. Two girls had come up to me last week asking for some movies they could watch that would show them the typical “college experience.” This may have you chuckling if you know me well, as I am probably the last person to ask about a “typical college experience.” However, I gave them a few names to look for. They returned with more girls this time and had decided to do a skit of an “initiation.” However, they wanted to mimic the sorting hat from Harry Potter. If that means nothing to you, basically it's a talking hat that tells each student what house or group they will be in. In our case, the “hat” will tell them what language to study.

            The skit, being for the American English program, needed to be written in English. The three girls that ended up staying to work on/write the skit basically did not want to speak any English. Therefore, they'd give me an idea in Russian, and I'd do a on-the-spot translation into English...with a little elaboration, naturally. We ended up writing a opening speech, and then several different statements for the students who have to wear the hat. The following are similar to a few we came up with:

            -I can see you have ancestors from the far off land and time of Ancient Greek, and therefore it may be appropriate for you to study Ancient Greek. However, as I can see you also inherited the wisdom of the Greeks as well, and therefore you will study the great language of ENGLISH!

            -I sense a great love of KungFu movies in you, and so Chinese may be a good fit for you. However, Chinese is a very difficult language. ENGLISH!

            -You, dear student, I can see will one day become a great diplomat. Azerbaijani will assist you in such a prestigious position. However, you will not become a diplomat for a very, very long time. Therefore, for now...ENGLISH!

            -I think you would love to study Latin. But who needs Latin nowadays?! ENGLISH!!!!

            And so on and so forth. They are supposed to be humorous. Hopefully you found them so. It ends with the new Freshman swearing the “oath” on an American English textbook saying they will strive to study hard, do their homework, and never speak with a British accent. It took us about an hour to write the whole of the skit, which was very good practice for my Russian. If there was an English word I used they didn't know, I'd try to explain it in Russian, and if all else failed, one student had a computer dictionary.

            After the day was over I went and grabbed some more pelmeni. The two ladies working in the produkty were the happiest and kindest I have ever encountered in a Russian store. When I was walking back home, I wasn't terribly hungry and didn't really feel like cooking a huge meal, so I stopped at one of the food carts to which Veronika introduced me. I bought a Russian panini (bread, cheese, ham) for 29 rubles, which is less than $1, and happily walked back home. I had texted Katya to see if she would be willing to go to Beeline, the telephone company, the next day with me, as I'm tired of this no internet thing. Monday evening I had gone to put more money on my phone, thinking I had run out, but apparently somehow I had not used any money. Also, I guess you start off with a certain amount of credit because I had more money on my account than I ever put on it. As most of my use on my phone has been people calling me, I hadn't really used the money I had. As I ended up practically doubling the funds I had already on my account, I figure I might as well turn on the internet and pay for it. I think I'm still only going to use half of the money. Oh well. I'll only use a few dollars. If anyone reading this is planning on going to Nizhny Novgorod, you can have my sim card.

            Alright, back on the main path, I ran into Katya right outside the university, which is adjacent to my dorm. She was on her way to teach an English class at the bank, and we ended up going after her class. The poor guy at Beeline. My phone is in English, and that made things more complicated to set up. However, there was a really amusing television show playing in the office, and Katya and I were dying of laughter during it. After a bit, the internet now works on my phone. Email, facebook, and most importantly MULTITRAN.RU! are now at my fingertips. Once again, Katya to the rescue.

           

            Today, Wednesday, was Teacher's Day. The lobby was full of balloons, posters, girls in short skirts with flowers, and stand-up speakers blasting out music. You've not celebrated a holiday until you've done it Russian style.

            Ludmila, Yuliya, Nadia, and I had a fun conversation this morning. Ludmila asked if I liked Mexican food, and I said I like some types of Mexican foods. We ended up talking about how Americans seem to like spicy cuisine, and Russians don't really like it much. I hadn't thought of this much before, excepting the part where my father and Lynnea often seem to compete to see who can effectively burn all of their tastebuds off first, however in listing type of food we have in America that are spicy, the list was pretty surprisingly exhaustive: Mexican, Cajun, Thai, Indian, some Chinese, and anything Southern. I also want to include wasabi in that list, but I know it's not a food category.

            This lead to a conversation about food that “every typical American” likes. I defied the norm when I said not only to I not like gravy, I can't stand it. However, I feel that my great love of mash potatoes redeems me. Someone okra came up, and I tried to describe it. To my surprise I found it practically impossible to describe well. There is no translation for okra in Russian. It's simply transliterated.

            A little bit later, after we were done with American food, a girl came into the American Center and came up to the desk where Yuliya, Nadia, and I were looking at signs for Teachers' Day. She said a friend of hers had told her there was an American girl there that understood phonetics really well and had helped him out a lot. Yuliya and Nadia turned to me, and I mentioned he must have meant me. It was a nice to feel appreciated for my degree. The girl, Susha, had a few pages from Pride & Prejudice which she had selected for her assignment. She had gone through the text and picked out words that were contrastive or complimentary pairs.

            Quick linguistic interruption: A contrastive pair is two words which differ in only one sound, and that sound creates a clear distinction between the words. An example of this would be “do” and “to.” The initial sounds are the same in everything except that one is voice and one is voiceless (and if you want to get technical, the latter is also aspirated). A complimentary pair is two words which differ in one sound, but that sound does not necessarily register as different to the native speaker. For example, “do” and “due” if you pronounce the latter with a palatalized “d” (which is the sound you get when you say, “Did you eat yet?” fast. The “did you” becomes the same sounds as “due.”

            Susha hadn't really understood this difference, so we started out redefining terms. They I went through and had her repeat some of the contrastive pairs after me. When we got to “vary” and “very” I mentioned that those are pronounced the same in most, if not all, all American Englishes. That was the moment that I realized that Susha is not a student of American English. She studies British English...which meant that for two hours I had a justifiable reason to speak like a Brit. :D It was quickly very apparent to me that Susha's pronunciation is very good. She breezed through nearly all of the contrasts that Slavic speakers usually struggle with. Therefore, I asked her what she wanted to work on...and that's when it got fun. She was learning how to correctly identify sounds, and wasn't super confident in the terminology. She showed me what they had covered so far in her workbook. It seems not only are they learning British, they are using British linguistic terminology. So now I know how to describe things like a Brit as well. I would give her two words she had picked out from the text and ask her to tell me the contrasting sound and list the various features of each. Then, after a bit, I told her I wanted two similarities and two differences. Every once in a while I though her for a loop by giving her a pair that, with the material we had covered thus far, she could only list one difference. However, she's a very quick learner, and I was quite impressed with her. Finally, I told her that the typical way to talk about a sound is with three characteristics in the following order: 1)Voiced/voiceless (which is lenis/fortis in Brit speak), 2) Place of Articulation (aka. Where the sound is made in your mouth), and 3) Manner of Articulation (stops, fricatives, affricates, etc). However, they hadn't covered manner yet, so we just had sonorant (which means you can make the sound continuously like m, l, s, sh, f) or obstruent (sounds you can't make continuously like p, t, k, ch). Again the terminology here was a little different (constrictive, meaning not all of the air is stopped, versus occlusive, where all the air is stopped). For the most part there isn't a different between the two. We used this to describe the sounds, and she found that helped a lot as it order the thoughts a lot better.

            As she got quicker and quicker, I'd tell her only to give me a difference, or only a similarities. Then I'd tell her to give me a pair that only differed on the first point of the last point, and then I got more specific. I was in high heaven, and she said that I had managed to clarify and solidify in two hours what she'd been learning for five weeks. I'm hoping she's come back when she has more questions, as I could play contrastive pairs for hours on end. When I felt that there was nothing more I could do for her, we just talked (and in Russian. YAY!). We talked about difficulties in studying different languages and what native/foreign speakers struggled with or didn't understand in both Russian and English. We had a great time and laughed a lot. It was around 2:30 when she headed off to her next class, and I walked over to the counter where a few of the instructors, Yuliya, and Nadia were working on something. They were writing a poem in the style of “Ten Little Indians” for the Freshman Party, so this version is “Twelve Little Freshmen.” It was a definitely a collaborative creative effort, and we had several laughs from it.

            Earlier in the day, Tikhonov, the professor from LUNN who often goes to PSU in the summer to teach a few language courses, came to see how I was doing. He said my answer that I was doing well, or normal, wasn't very convincing. He asked if I was homesick, and I said a little. He said I need to travel. That's the third person now who's told me to go to Moscow. I am looking into it, I just can't decide when will be best to go. He also said that he wanted to take Jackie and I out to the dacha (country home, usually a little more rustic) on Saturday, and I said we'd both love that. He wants to make sure it's not raining on the day we go so that we can actually go out and about. I look forward to that future, non-rainy Saturday. After my talk with Tikhonov, I thought that I should do something fun after school today, so I sent Jackie a text to see if she'd like to look at shops or something. She said that she'd love too, and it was good we decided to do so because we both needed a pick me up. However, I'm getting ahead of myself.

            Backtracking, we decided to meet at 5 so that I'd have time to go home and make some food. When I walked to the kitchen I heard a lot of voices. Usually I avoid the kitchen when there are a lot of people there because it's hectic...and I'm shy. However, there was no avoiding it this time. There were four Russian girls and one Korean (who I later learned is my new neighbor, but I'm getting ahead again). One of the Russian girls I had spoken with some before, and we had a bit of a conversation when I first arrived. The Russians were playing some rock music, and one girl was asking another what group it was. The girl whose phone was playing the music was trying to say the name in English but couldn't quite remember. She started with something like “kills engage,” and, being nosy, I proffered, “Killswitch Engage?” She turned and smiled at me and said that was it. All of a sudden, I have new acquaintances as we talked about music. Thank you James McGrady for bolstering my knowledge of rock bands. They hadn't heard of some of my favorite groups, so hopefully sometime in the future I'll be able to share some music with them.

            6 girls cooking a kitchen with 4 burners is quite the experience. Just wanted to throw that out there.

            Right as I was leaving the kitchen, Nina, one of the Koreans from next door, came in and introduced their new roommate to me...however somehow the name part got skipped. Right before I left to go meet up with Jackie, the new girl invited me to eat dinner with them tomorrow. She's going to make Korean curry. I am very excited.

            The weather earlier in the day hadn't been super great, but it wasn't terrible. However, when I stepped outside it was raining and gusty. When I got to the meeting point, I mentioned that coffee was going to have to be in order during the course of the evening. Jackie agreed. As we walked along Bolshaya Prokovskaya it got worse and worse...so we did coffee first. I took Jackie to Молоко (Milk) which was the cafe Alex and Katya had taken me to last Monday. We had warm drinks and desert. I had a cherry strudel which was to die for.

            Then we headed to a souvenir building. It's one big store of various Russian-y things, that we wanted to peruse. Most of the items there are actually really reasonably priced, and we got some good ideas for Christmas presents. Sadly, one of the things I really wanted was very expensive, and they didn't have something else I was looking for, but I have lots of new ideas now.

            After this we just walked back down the street. We stopped into one shop that sold nothing but tights and leggings. We joked that we shouldn't leave Russia without some pleather leggings, which we could purchase there. However, they were more expensive than the stainless steel pot I purchased, so I'm not sure that will actually happen. We then walked through the Kremlin and back along the river. I am proud to say that we spoke in only Russian until just the very end. This has been a good Russian-speaking week for me so far. I'm really trying to push myself to stay out of my comfort zone and only speak English when working with students.

            As I don't have anything clever to end with, I'll explain the last word in the title. Khokhloma is a traditional Russian art style. You've probably seen wooden spoons or swans painted in this style. They tend to use black, red, and gold...and occasionally green.

            Teaser: The next entry will talk about the idioms for this week (Medieval Themed thanks to an inspiration forwarded to me by my mother) and the Freshman party.