Thursday 28 June 2012

*@!$@!! Russian swear words

I have an unfortunate tendency, when very upset, to want to lapse into nineteenth-century English. I am not sure how people nowadays are expected to react when their sister runs off with some unsuitable man or when someone insults them, but I just want to throw my gloves on the floor and tell the offender my second will be round in the morning. There is something in the back of my mind, though, that tells me I should be swearing at the person instead.

Swearing at people is best avoided in foreign languages, even apart from the obvious rudeness, since swearing is all about attitude, which is much harder to pull off with a funny accent. Plus you really need to understand a lot about the nuances of the words to use them properly, otherwise we are back to sounding silly or just odd rather than threatening. The upside of all this is that it is also very difficult to be insulted in a foreign language. Even if you technically know the words are very rude, you don't FEEL that they are rude, and hence it is almost impossible to take offense.

Russian swear words, it turns out, are much "stronger" than British swear words, in the sense that you can't actually use them on TV, radio or in print, whereas I think you are allowed to swear as much as you like after nine o'clock in the evening in the UK. There are two groups of Russian swear words: one set that are pretty bad but are in fact usable, although not in polite company, in front of children etc, and one set that are much stronger and are basically not usable if you are an educated person (this group of words is called мат (mat)). There are four basic words in this group, but if four words is not enough there are basically limitless variations - you can add prefixes or suffixes or combine them with other words. Four words should be four times as many as you need though - Dostoevsky wrote that a Russian could express the entire range of his feelings with one word of мат. But I guess people like to be creative. A quick Google search will take you to this site, which lists an unbelievable 1700 words or expressions you shouldn't use. Or this Russian language tutorial site, which hilariously has a lesson on Russian swear words between discussions on meeting people and shopping.

There is a long history of intolerance of the use of мат. Catherine the Great issued a special proclamation banning all use of one of the words. Under the Soviets you could end up with a fifteen day jail sentence for using мат, and even today public use of these words is punishable by a fine and possible arrest (although in practice this is rarely enforced). According to a 2003 article in the New Yorker, the prejudice against these words came in with Christianity in the 10th century. The theory is that these words, which are all to do with sex, were previously part of a pagan fertility cult the Christian missionaries were trying to stamp out. They apparently still sound, to Russian ears, fairly blasphemous (and Russians are overall more religious than people in the UK so this matters more). For example, one of the most basic formulae implies that the mother of the person you are talking to slept with the devil. On the other hand, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and Chekov all used мат in their writing, and it shows up in a lot of folk tales. Some people feel that while it can be rude, it isn't necessarily - it can just be expressive. That article in the New Yorker referred to it as "more of a philosophy than a language", indicating everything from power dynamics to sincerity, with the real meaning of the words heavily dependent on intonation and context and thus almost impossible to translate. I don't think you'd find anyone saying that about British swear words. Or maybe I just don't know enough about them.

Wednesday 27 June 2012

Policeman on a train

Generally speaking, Russian policeman (or militiamen, or whatever) are supposed to be scary. The first time I came to Russia, for work, the head of the office in Moscow told me that if I saw the police I should walk very quickly in the opposite direction. He even thought it necessary to give me his phone number in case I got into trouble. Clearly, Moscow was a dangerous place.

Except of course, the policemen I spoke to on that visit, after ignoring his advice (unintentionally - I just forgot), were very helpful, laughed at my feeble attempts at Russian and generally didn't try to steal all my money (or in fact any of my money). Still, if you read the guidebooks, they still tell you never to show a policeman your real passport (in case they take it off you), and to pretend to call your embassy if they start asking too many questions.

So when I got on the train to St Petersburg a week ago, and found myself in a compartment with two militia people, I wasn't very amused. The younger one (in his mid-20s) launched into a long speech about something or other, of which I understood absolutely nothing, and told him so. He smiled and said, "it's alright, you don't have to do anything", and then, since it was by now obvious that I was a foreigner, we started on the normal topics of conversation. After a while he inevitably asked me what I was doing in the country. Unfortunately my face unconsciously twists in some peculiar way whenever anyone asks me about real life, and he thought he had offended me. He held up his hands and said, "no, no, I'm not asking officially, I was just interested", and since I hadn't meant to evade the question in the first place, I of course explained. We talked some more about home and abroad, life etc etc, and I actually felt kind of sorry for him. He wasn't from anywhere near Moscow, and he got sent round the country to wherever, so he must have been miles away from everyone he knew. He told me that he had learnt English years ago in school, but he had never been able to practice it because no foreigners came to his home town. And then he plucked at his uniform and said, "and now foreigners won't approach me because of this". To which the only response is yes, that would do it. We carried on talking and eventually his boss said they had to go and do some work, and they both left the compartment.

After half an hour or so, the younger one came back and opened up his laptop. I was reading a book, but periodically I could hear American voices emanating from his computer, saying things like, "enemy forces sighted" and "fire". So when his boss reappeared and they both went out to do some more work, obviously I looked at his computer to see what the hell he was doing. And guess what it was? Some US video game where you go round shooting baddies - Call of Duty 2 or something.

It's somehow comforting to think that so many 20-something year old guys around the world are the same. No matter what their job, they really want to be playing video games and shooting bad guys.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

Hummus is how much? The cost of living

Today I did my weekly food shop, got back, looked at the receipt and thought, holy crap! I just spent £4.50 on hummus! I don't know how it is possible that hummus is so expensive - maybe there was an unspecial offer. Before I came to Russia I assumed that food would be cheaper than in the UK, but this has not turned out to be the case. Specifically, anything I eat appears to be expensive.

Of course, I don't have to eat hummus. But it does take a while, when you move to a new country/new living situation, to work out what you are now going to live on. You have to go round the shops, pick up the food, examine it from all sides, and consider the all-important question, can I cook this in my current kitchen? For me, this has generally meant on one ring. Technically when I lived in New York I had an oven for a couple of years, but I was short of bookshelves at the time so I had to fill the oven with books, which made turning it on difficult. Currently I subsist almost entirely on risotto, which I can cook in one pan and requires a minimum of excess water. This is important because everything has to be done with bottled water so it is a huge waste of water to boil anything. At the end of the month I will have another problem, as my room mate is going back to Japan, taking her fridge with her. No more cereal for me.

In Russia there is a lack of several important (to me) food items, including tins. There is very little tinned food in the supermarkets near me, and instead they go in for dried food in a big way. This means no tinned soup, no tinned chickpeas or butter beans (well, they have imported tinned butter beans in Елисеевский (Yeliseyevsky), the Moscow equivalent of Harrods food hall, but at more than £1 per tin, it's just not worth it). I am too lazy to soak beans overnight, and dried soup is not as good as tinned soup. These aren't the only deficits: Russia, along with the entire non-UK world, is yet to discover the delights of salt and vinegar hula hoops, neither are they alive to the wonders of orange squash, although you can get the strange French mint squash in Ашан (Ashan - a French supermarket chain). One the other hand, they have better bread than we do, especially dark rye bread, which is hard to get hold of in the UK, and Armenian bread, which is a bit like a tortilla. There is also something called творог (tvorog), which is like cottage cheese only less liquid, which is wonderful stuff. The honey here is better, and they sell пряники (lebkuchen) all year round, which is an improvement on trying to eat a year's supply at Christmas, my usual custom. Plus they have a lot more types of cured meat. In terms of fruit and vegetables, you can get most things, just possibly not when you want them. Either that, or the supermarkets near me need to fire whoever does their buying. One week they will purchase an enormous quantity of red peppers, which will proceed to slowly rot over the next few weeks, without them getting any more in. Likewise with broccoli - sometimes loads, then none for a month. Prices for some fresh foods vary from week to week, sometimes by as much as 25%, for no discernible reason.

A few (currently) strangely expensive foods here (using Ocado as a comparison): hummus (£4.58 vs 99p for 200g), squash (£5.16 vs £3.20 for a litre, using lemon syrup as squash), cauliflower heads (£1.46 vs £1.05), broccoli heads (£1.32 vs £1.20), Activia yoghurt 4-pack (£2.10 vs £1.84), cottage cheese 340g (£1.65 vs 95p). Rye bread is much cheaper (50p vs £1.60 per loaf), as is risotto rice (£1.11 vs £2.24 for 900g), and orange juice (79p vs £1.20 for 1 litre). Overall I spend about the same amount on food here as I did in when I was a student in the UK.

The trouble with this is the difference in wages. The average (median) annual wage in Russia in 2011 was £4,200 ($6,875), vs £20,800 ($33,385) in the UK (2010) and £16,425 ($26,364) in the US (2010). Even assuming the median wage in Russia is actually higher due to the white/black income thing, food must take up a much higher percentage of a family's income than in the US/UK. As this article indicates, for 10% of the population it takes up 100% of their income, and 53% of the population only have enough money for food, utilities and clothing. Something like buying your own apartment is only possible for 1% of the population. To buy a one-bedroom flat in Moscow would require the average Muscovite (who already earns more than most Russians) to save 100% of their income for 12 years!

[Of course, in the UK unless you're really rich you have to pay tax on income, and in Russia, well, multiple people have told me no one in their right mind pays their taxes. Theoretically income tax is 13%, but you can get around this by having a difference between your white income and black income.Your white income is your official income on which you have to pay tax. The company you work for will often set this really really low, and then just pay you the rest (your black/grey income) on the side. However, if one day you suddenly need a much larger official income, for example if you want to get a visa to visit Europe or the States, your firm will just print you out a new piece of paper saying you now earn shed loads of money.]

As newspapers in the UK are constantly telling us, the most expensive thing in life is children. The Guardian reported this year that the cost for raising one child to adulthood is now £218,000, a number that cannot possibly be true, because it would mean most of the population would be unable to afford any children at all. [In fact, if you look at how they calculate these numbers it becomes clear that the people who write for the Guardian are quite odd, since this total includes more than £62,000 on childcare and babysitting and their list of "essentials" includes buying the child a car.] In Russia, however, it must be legitimately difficult for parents to afford to raise more than one child, given the high cost of essentials that are actually essential. This is why you get situations like the tour guide I had in Krasnoyarsk, who had an undergraduate degree in Physics, a PhD in Political Science and had to work three jobs to support his one son. He wasn't even doing this on his own - his wife also worked, as a lecturer in Mathematics at the university. These were highly educated, professional people - if they had to work this hard just to support one child, what hope does anyone else have? Maybe this is why Russia has such a big demographics problem.

Note on source for median wage: Rosstat (Russian source for statistics) didn't provide median, only mean from what I could see, so I averaged the mean wages for the 5th and 6th decile of workers. Not perfect obviously, but I think the underlying point still stands. I was surprised about the difference in median wage between the US and the UK as well, but I think this is correct. The mean US wage is of course higher than the mean UK wage, but wealth is more unevenly distributed. And the tax rate might be lower in the US, I can't remember, and this is wage not income, which might also make a difference. Exchange rates used as average over period. 

Saturday 9 June 2012

End of term and accents

Yesterday was the last day of the summer term at the language school I attend, so the last week or so has been taken up with farewells. It is not the last day for me, since I am staying on until September at least, but most of the university students are leaving. We had another talent show type thing, which was marginally less embarrassing than the one at Christmas, but rather more depressing, because it did underline how bad most of us still are at Russian. According to the US State Department, it should take a native English speaker around 2,300 hours (1,100 hours of classes and the rest self-study) of study to reach competency in Russian, whatever that means. I think so far I am at around 850, so I am not even half way there yet. Must work harder. Presumably the number of required hours is higher for Japanese/Korean/Chinese people, who form the majority of the student body. Since a lot of them basically didn't know any Russian at all when they got here, a year isn't really that long.

Even with 2,300 hours I don't expect I'll get the accent right, which is another problem. British people, so presumably Americans as well, mainly have problems with soft sounds in Russian, i.e. we tend to pronounce щ like ш, and don't say things like счастье (shactiye - happiness) and любовь (lubov - love) correctly, or anything else that involves soft signs (ь), i.e. almost every single verb. I have now watched over 60 hours of my Russian soap opera Poor Nastya (Бедная Настя), and the word любовь comes up a lot (it is a melodrama), and every time I try to copy the way the actors say it, but I still can't get it right. People from Belarus have the same problem according to my teacher, so I guess maybe British people and Belarussians sound similar when speaking Russian?

Speaking of accents, I started watching a different soap opera last week, because I already know the only people I like in Бедная Настя are going to end up unhappy, and it really disturbs me when people I like are unhappy, even fictional people (perhaps especially fictional people, since in reality the possibility of future happiness always exists, whereas in fiction being unhappy at the end of a book is final). This one is called Грехи Отцов (Grekhi Otsov - Sins of the Fathers) and the main attraction of it is that it has most of the same actors as Бедная Настя, including the people I like, so I am hoping they will end up happy this time round. Anyway, the point of all this burble is that they have a couple of American characters (played by Russians), who have to do American accents in Russian, which is really strange to listen to. It's obvious, I suppose, that actors from every country must have to do foreign accents, I just hadn't really thought about it before. It would be really interesting to know how they describe different accents to Russians in theatre school - what does an American/French/English accent sound like to a Russian person? And do they bother trying to distinguish a New York American accent from a Texan American accent?

Lots of native English-speaking people like foreign accents, especially French, Italian and Spanish ones, but apparently these accents don't sound so great when you are speaking Russian. My teacher said French accents sound especially bad, which is a new and totally bizarre concept to me, since almost everyone loves French accents in the UK. The best foreign accents to have are from the Baltic republics, which are pleasant to listen to. Maybe like Irish accents sound to the English?