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?

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