This is something that came up in my English conversation group a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about "what women want" or something, and for some reason one of the students asked me if I knew any jokes about British scientists (I didn't). Apparently here in Russia there are lots of jokes about British scientists doing bizarre or pointless research. So if someone has done some research to show that alcohol makes you drunk or something similarly self-evident, they will say that it was probably done by a British scientist. I am not sure what to make of this, especially because it is not only in Russia - another student said there are lots of Czech jokes about British scientists as well. Not really complementary, but definitely interesting.
Sunday 18 March 2012
The joys of В Контакте
Russians don't really use Facebook that much, instead they have В Контакте. I have no idea if this is better for keeping in touch with your friends, but it is a lot more useful for learning languages. On В Контакте you can watch films, TV shows, music videos etc etc, in Russian, for free. This is probably illegal but people seem quite relaxed about copyright here. Currently I am watching the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast in Russian whilst trying to read Lermontov. The songs are pretty distracting, because since I know all the words in English (and why not?), I keep trying to predict how they will translate them whilst trying to keep the rhymes (like "large" and "barge" when Gaston is singing about how many eggs he eats).
But the best thing so far about В Контакте is a Russian soap opera set at the beginning of the 19th century called Бедная Настя. It's weirdly addictive, a bit like Sunset Beach (with similar production values and believability of story lines). I think it was made for the hard-of-thinking, because everyone speaks really slowly, so I can actually understand what they are saying. Plus, like Sunset Beach, nothing ever happens. You can skip four or five episodes and the same people will still be in the same room talking about the same thing, which means lots of repetition of vocabulary. One girl spent three episodes complaining about being locked in her room, trying to pick the lock with a variety of knitting needles, combs, hair pins etc, before it occurred to her that she could just climb out the window. Another scene involved a serf theatre rehearsing Romeo and Juliet in Russian, with the барин yelling at some poor serf girl about how could she not know the balcony scene - EVERYONE knows the balcony scene. I can't think of any British soap operas where people quote Shakespeare (although to be fair, this may be because I don't watch any British soap operas). Yes, so Бедная Настя is fantastic, even if they do dance to pop music at their balls.
But the best thing so far about В Контакте is a Russian soap opera set at the beginning of the 19th century called Бедная Настя. It's weirdly addictive, a bit like Sunset Beach (with similar production values and believability of story lines). I think it was made for the hard-of-thinking, because everyone speaks really slowly, so I can actually understand what they are saying. Plus, like Sunset Beach, nothing ever happens. You can skip four or five episodes and the same people will still be in the same room talking about the same thing, which means lots of repetition of vocabulary. One girl spent three episodes complaining about being locked in her room, trying to pick the lock with a variety of knitting needles, combs, hair pins etc, before it occurred to her that she could just climb out the window. Another scene involved a serf theatre rehearsing Romeo and Juliet in Russian, with the барин yelling at some poor serf girl about how could she not know the balcony scene - EVERYONE knows the balcony scene. I can't think of any British soap operas where people quote Shakespeare (although to be fair, this may be because I don't watch any British soap operas). Yes, so Бедная Настя is fantastic, even if they do dance to pop music at their balls.
Is the basement infested with asbestos?
On the whole, I think it is. I looked online at some photos of asbestos cladding around pipes, and it looks like what is in the basement of the общежитие by the washing machine room. The pipes that have fibres flaking off them continuously. Since I have been walking by these pipes four times a week for the last six months, this is less than ideal. It also means I should probably do the rest of my washing by hand in my room. I tried this last week and it made me very grateful for washing machines - it takes an age, the soap is a pain to get out of the clothes, and then you have to wait two days for everything to dry. On the other hand, it is a lot better than lung cancer.
There is a possibility that the whole building is, in fact, made of asbestos.
There is a possibility that the whole building is, in fact, made of asbestos.
Maslenitsa!
This was three weeks ago, but I’ve only just managed
to borrow a cable to transfer my photos from my camera to my computer.
Maslenitsa is a week long religious and folk festival before the start of
Orthodox lent. It may have originally been a festival to celebrate the Sun and
the end of winter. Nowadays it is the last week in which Christians are allowed
to eat milk, cheese and other dairy products before Lent, so people make
pancakes all week long.
I went with my roommate to Suzdal, a town on the Golden
Ring. Suzdal is the Russian version of Lacock, in that it has been
protected from development and hence is used in all period dramas, with the
locals often roped in as extras.
We got there on the Friday night, after an epic journey from
Moscow bus station that took us 6 hours and involved passing three car crashes,
all to cover the same distance as from London to Nottingham. I suppose this is
why the oligarchs have helicopters. On the Saturday morning though, the
horrendous journey seemed worth it. Suzdal was covered in snow, and not the way
Moscow is where it looks like someone has spray painted the snow deep brown,
but snow like in movies, which somehow never gets dirty or slushy.
Nativity of the Virgin Cathedral |
Believe it or not there a river in this picture |
We traipsed down to the open air architecture museum, where
the day began with a parade that involved some people in traditional costume
and other people dressed as geese, followed by Round 1 in the Goose Fighting
competition. Unfortunately, these geese were lovers not fighters, so it took a
lot of coaxing from their keepers before they started biting each other. As I
understand it, technically it is supposed to go to First Blood, but the
audience got bored way before that and started yelling, so the organisers ended
the fight and determined the winner based on points (I have no idea how that
works).
Next came climbing up a pole to grab a prize stuck at the top.
Presumably for reasons of increased grip, most participants seemed to think
this was best done wearing as few clothes as possible. I should note that it
was pretty cold, probably twelve below zero or something, with a biting wind,
and it snowed pretty much non-stop. If you made it to the top, apart from the
adoration of the crowd, you got a roast goose.
How to get hypothermia in pursuit of a goose |
Throughout the day there was traditional music and dancing,
sledging, rides in horse-drawn sleighs, a game which involved hitting your
opponent with a pillow until they fell off a log, and a never-ending tug-of-war.
There were no teams, passers by just piled in on whichever side looked like
losing, and then left when they had had enough, to be replaced immediately by
others. And whenever it all got too cold, you could buy hot pancakes and tea,
spiced wine or sbiten, a honey-based drink. Alternatively you could go and sit
in the wooden church, which was warm (this option was very popular).
Trying to knock your friend off a log with a pillow |
Jingle bells |
Not sure why there was a sword fight but hey... |
Massive snowball fight which resulted in the total destruction of the snowhouse (this was the aim) |
The following day was pretty much the same but in a different
location, and ended at around 4pm with the burning of the baba, a figure of a
woman who personifies winter. After
that, everyone rapidly disappeared, and we were left with another mammoth
journey back to Moscow, during which we left one person behind after stopping
for a toilet break in the middle of nowhere. Travelling in Russia is not without risk.
Goodbye, Winter! |
Saturday 17 March 2012
Why are the English bad at learning languages?
One of the first things I noticed when I started at my
language school here was that 60% of the student body was from East Asia
(China, Japan and Korea). I hadn’t given
much thought to what nationalities would be in the school, but if you’d asked
me to guess, I wouldn’t have come up with there being twice as many South
Koreans as British people. Why were the Koreans studying Russian? The answer I
got from everyone was that it would be useful for a career in business. Russia
(along with Brazil, India and China) is one of the BRIC countries, a group of
key emerging market countries that are expected to be at the forefront of the
shift in global economic power away from G7 countries to the developing world.
If Russia is going to become increasingly important, why
aren’t more British students studying Russian? If we are all going to be
competing for a piece of the economic growth here, a big advantage will accrue
to countries that can field workers familiar with both the language and the
culture.
Russkiy Mir, a foundation set up to promote Russian language
and culture around the world, estimates that 300,000 Chinese and 150,000 German
school children are studying Russian. In England and Wales I estimate the
number is more like 12,000-15,000, i.e. Germany has more than ten times the
number of children studying Russian than England and Wales.
Russian is a minority language in the UK, and is probably
only offered by a small number of schools, but these low numbers are part of
the wider problem of language tuition in English schools. There has been a fair
amount of comment on language learning in the press (well, in the Guardian
anyway), but sometimes it seems to me that people just accept that English
people are bad at languages, as though it were some law of nature we couldn’t
change if we wanted to. There is often an unspoken feeling that foreign
countries superior to us in language skills have an “unfair” advantage, because
they watch US films, listen to US music and play US video games.
But there is a simpler explanation as to why so few English
people speak a foreign language: we don’t study them for very long. England
requires children to study a foreign language for 3 years (ages 11-14),
compared with an average of 8.2 years across a group of other nations
investigated by INCA, an organisation that compares education policies across
countries [I added in Germany and the US, using Texas as a stand-in for the
latter]. Note that Welsh and Scottish
children seem much better off [Figure 1]
Figure 1. Source: INCA, Texas Department of Education |
English children also study languages for fewer hours per
school year than in other countries. At age 14, the government recommends that
children in England study a foreign language for 72 hours across the school
year, compared with 126 hours in France, and 114 in Germany. [Figure 2] The combination of fewer years of language teaching, and fewer hours in those
years, means that at the end of compulsory education, an English child will have
had 70% fewer hours of language teaching than their equivalents in France or
Germany. [Figure 3] Ta-da! There’s no magic stopping us from learning
languages, we just don’t put the hours in.
Figure 2. Source: INCA, own estimates |
Figure 3. Source: INCA, own estimates |
All this suggests a fairly simple route for improving the
foreign language skills of the average school child – teach them for longer.
According to a Eurobarometer survey from 2005, 78% of people in the UK agree
with the statement “everyone in the European Union should be able to speak one
language in addition to their mother tongue”. If we are serious about this we
have to make a longer period of language tuition compulsory.
There are three main objections I can see to this. Firstly, it
is difficult to learn languages, so it’s not fair to force less academic
children to study them; secondly, we don’t have enough language teachers to
pull this off; and thirdly, there isn’t enough space on the timetable to double
the number of hours a week children spend on languages.
As I sit here, taking a break from trying to stuff Russian
verbs into my head, I can’t honestly say that languages are easy. In fact, I
often complain to myself that if only I had started learning Russian at six
rather than sixteen, I wouldn’t have to bother with any of this. And that is
the answer – start teaching languages at primary school. It makes no sense to
only begin teaching languages to someone when their natural ability to learn
them has already fallen off dramatically. Of course, you could argue that there
are too many children with English as a second language to worry about teaching
children anything other than English in primary school. But obviously, since I
brought it up, I don’t think this a good argument. Less than 10% of British
people speak a language other than English as their mother tongue. Even
allowing for some skew towards young people, this doesn’t seem prohibitively
high to me, since Germany has a similar proportion of its population with a mother
tongue other than German, and they manage to teach languages just fine.
I don’t think finding language teachers should be an
insurmountable problem either. Primary schools could have one language teacher
each, who would teach all the classes in that school, or language teachers could be
peripatetic and teach at several schools in one area. If there aren’t enough
qualified people in England, hire qualified foreigners.
The third obstacle, that there isn’t enough space in the
timetable, is the most difficult. It depends on what our priorities are. What
do children need to learn? How do we
compare the importance of a foreign language with the importance of drama, or
history, or design? It should at least give us pause that other countries
almost uniformly give languages a much higher priority than we do. Which brings me back to my own situation,
sitting in a tiny box room in Moscow, trying to learn Russian. I am doing this
because if I want to work in an international organisation, from the UN to the
EU to the World Bank, I need to speak another language. Speaking a foreign
language is an advantage in many companies, and this will only become more
true, if the economic prosperity of the UK comes to depend more and more on the
BRICs and other emerging markets. An ability to cut shapes out of MDF is not, however,
likely to be required.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)