More about Tatjana Sergejevna

Not one to be discouraged, Tatiana Sergejevna found a way to secure an institutional affiliation. She talked to her friends at a language school (called “Boston” as it turned out).

Basically, they could give me what I needed. Ten hours of Russian per week for thirteen weeks, for less than the equivalent of US$4000, with receipts presented upon payment.

One thing I did have to clarify, though, was that I needed ten real hours (that is to say, 600 minutes), not ten academic hours. An academic hour, in Russia, is defined as forty-five minutes, so the first draft contract that the school drew up was actually for 450 minutes per week. Also interesting: Not knowing what else to call them, I used the phrase «солнечные часы» (solnechnyje chasy – “solar hours”), and Tat’jana Sergejevna corrected me: Apparently the correct phrase for real, 60-minute, non-academic hours is «астрономические часы» -- “astronomical hours.” Sun, stars… whatever. I’d just pulled the phrase “solar hours” completely out of my… um… hat, so I was happy with how close my guess came…

One of T.S.’s first homework assignments for me was to write about myself, what I was doing in Novosibirsk, and why I wanted to learn Russian. I wrote about how I was in Novosibirsk working as a teacher, and that outside my teaching duties and other Fulbright duties (are you reading this, Becca Dash?), my highest priority was to improve my Russian. I said I was most interested in learning to understand spoken Russian and speak Russian fluently, and that I also wanted to read better in Russian, and I believed this would be easier as I developed the other skills became more fluent. Finally, I said that improving my writing was my lowest priority, because I didn’t see myself ever needing to write much in Russian, and, more to the point, I didn’t think it would be possible for me to learn to write well in Russian from a stylistic point of view. Maybe I could with a lot of practice and commitment and a total immersion experience… Joseph Conrad, after all, didn’t learn English until he was in his twenties. But it’s not like I’m planning to be for Russian literature what Joseph Conrad was for English literature. Writing is good exercise and a good vocabulary-builder, but I won’t be devastated if I fail to master the subtleties of Russian style before I leave Novosibirsk.

I figured this was so she could get an idea of how to plan her lessons to suit my needs.

Not so.

When I brought back my composition the next day, I was surprised to find that before we got around to looking at it, we spent almost an hour (out of the three hours we had) on phonetics. This was after she had told me herself that she didn’t think my pronunciation needed much more work. She had me do tongue-twisters, which was fine. We got hung up for a while on pronouncing и as ы in the phrase «перед играми», or something equally trivial. Basically, it was the kind of negligible phonetic imperfection that would never prevent anyone from understanding you.

As I’ve had more time studying with Tat’jana Sergejevna, I’ve come to realize that this kind of intense fine-tuning is characteristic: Her lessons seem to be designed not with the goal of helping me communicate better, but with the goal of making me pronounce Russian exactly like a Russian, or communicate as perfectly idiomatically as a native speaker. Frankly, this is a totally unrealistic goal, but to be fair to T.S., I suspect it’s an attribute of traditional foreign language curricula in Russia rather than a peculiarity of her teaching style. It’s like the texts and methods she’s using are aimed at improving a Russian’s use of his own native language (e.g. explaining grammatical features and rules) rather than at helping a foreigner become more fluent (e.g. scenarios and dialogs).

Here’s another example: Whenever she asks me questions, and I give perfectly comprehensible but idiomatically awkward answers, she corrects me before I even finish the sentence, sometimes several times. It doesn’t seem quite fair to expect me to say something in a perfectly idiomatic way the first time. It would make sense for a Russian older than five who already had a good command of his first language and could be expected to express himself in an idiomatic way automatically. But for someone still learning the language, it’s just discouraging. In the U.S. they advise language teachers against correcting a student in the middle of a sentence, I think rightly. It’s been found that if children are corrected constantly when they’re learning to speak, they develop stammers. Although the consequences obviously aren’t nearly as dire for a foreign-language learner, it’s discouraging, not to say counterproductive, never to be able to express a complete thought before someone jumps in and makes you retread the last two words. It’s about as much fun as a traffic jam.

I’m far enough along in learning Russian that I’m not worried about this crippling my ability to communicate, but it’s frustratingly far off the track I was hoping to take with a tutor. Basically, I want to learn by doing, by trial and error. I want to use Russian copiously, to practice talking, writing, and reading out loud as much as possible, as freely as possible, without someone interrupting to explain grammar and phonetic rules to me that I already understand in theory. I do want to be corrected, but I want to have a chance to express my thoughts fully without someone cutting me off to correct negligible errors. I think if I had a chance to write that first composition again, I would be clearer about this…

Writing

When we did get around to reading the composition, she edited the hell out of it. Like I said, my Russian writing style leaves a lot to be desired, so this was expected. I was actually glad, because this was what I had wanted – to learn through practice, to learn by trial and error, to express myself and then have someone suggest how to improve my expression.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened when she got to the part about writing. When she read that I considered improving my writing the least important of my goals, she gasped and her eyes bugged out. “Njet!” she cried. “How can writing be unimportant?” She scolded me for this grave heresy and scribbled corrections on my paper, saying, “This is what you will say: ‘Writing is, for me, the most important of my goals.’” She then proceeded to change the rest of the paragraph to correspond to this line of thinking, and slashed all the sentences I had offered by way of explanation for the relatively low priority I assigned to writing. Hmm. OK, so it seemed that for Tatiana Sergeyevna, editing a student’s paper doesn’t just mean correcting grammar, style, and spelling, or checking for factual errors. It means changing the whole meaning of the statement if she disagrees with the opinion it expresses. Wow.

Let me stop here and clarify that I wasn’t as indignant about this as it might seem. First of all, her shock at what I had said was half-joking; she was smiling a little when she told me I couldn’t say writing was unimportant. In fact I would have thought she was ribbing me if she hadn’t then shown how serious she was by revising my entire argument.

At an earlier time in my life, when I was a little more hotheaded, this might have really pissed me off, but I’ve become more patient and besides…

I really like this woman. She has a huge heart and a great sense of humor. At our first lesson, she’d brought me vegetables from the garden at her dacha. She’s also one of these Russian women who seems ready, by instinct, to help someone in need in any way she can. Later, when we were doing lessons at her house, we took a break in the middle to eat and she actually cooked for both of us. At a later lesson, when I mentioned offhand that I was having trouble finding a jacket at a reasonable price, she went out on a walk with me afterwards, took me to three different stores and actually found me a really nice, name-brand jacket that I bought for the equivalent of $35. These last two things hadn’t happened yet at this stage, but I already had a strong inkling of how kind and generous she was.

Also, before coming to Novosibirsk, I resolved to be as patient as possible and just go with the flow, and that’s how I’m dealing with this. I’m not happy with all her teaching methods, but I’m content to chalk this up to cultural differences. I really just have to accept that in a Russian classroom, even in a private tutor-pupil dynamic, whatever the teacher says goes. Apart from my experience with her, I’ve heard things elsewhere to suggest that in Russia the teacher is accustomed to having control, and makes little effort to tailor the curriculum to the students’ interests. I remember hearing about a Russian chemistry professor at Tufts who told the parents of a prospective student, “I hate the students here. I hate them. They’re always trying to tell me what they want to learn about. I’m the professor!”

Fair enough, I guess.

You want to spend twenty minutes perfecting my pronunciation of the word чьему, even though there’s no way someone could misunderstand me the way I’m saying it? Sure. You want to edit my paper to say the opposite of what I meant, just because you disagree with me? That’s fine, you’re the teacher. You want to correct me five times before I make it to the end of a sentence, even though it’s perfectly clear what I mean? That’s your prerogative.

Besides, it’s not like I’m getting a final grade for these lessons, so the stakes aren’t high enough for me to raise a stink about these differences of opinion with my teacher.

Anyway, even if T.S.’s curriculum has had very little to do with my particular goals in using Russian, it hasn’t been a waste of time, either. I’m learning some stuff, although it’s not as much as it could be. Basically, T.S. might spend forty-five minutes on an unnecessary rehash of some grammar rule that I already understand, but then she’ll spend the next forty-five minutes editing and discussing a composition I’ve written for homework, which is genuinely helpful. It’s a mixed bag.

So I’ll just take the best I can out of it.