И потом она будет прыгать или она провалится (And then she will jump or she will fail)

This week's post is dedicated to Leonid, Andrey and Irina... Мои добросердечные друзья, у вас щедрые сердца!

Two years ago for my 40th birthday Chris gave me ten sessions of formal instruction in Russian. There were audible cheers from the Russian speaking world. I had no idea how awful and pathetic I was until I started this class. Ok I had some idea, but I was in deep, deep denial I had after all been attempting to speak Russian with Leonid and Irina for a few weeks. I thought I was making progress. I thought I was working. I was very wrong. And Leonid, Irina, and for what he was able to do Andrey also, were nice people who wanted to help me but honestly I think they were stumped also. Well, Andrey was not stumped. He had been putting me through my paces on noun declension for weeks. I got the idea but was still failing miserably.Every day he told me that "this was how Russian children learned it" and every day I proved beyond a doubt that all Russian children were smarter than me. I was starting to think he would in fact defenestrate himself in frustration.
I did not want blood on my hands or cause other forms of needless suffering for such nice people, so I started looking around for language schools. By pure chance I found a small school 30 minutes from my home. I called for an appointment. I told the woman on the phone that I had been working on my own for a few years but was really hoping formal classes could be helpful in helping me grow as a student and Russian speaker. She suggested I come in for an assessment and we would go from there. The assessment was a sad 45 minutes of me struggling to read the most basic words and having the instructor turn the pages back toward the beginning of the text book until I was practically reading the table of contents and the copyright information.
I could not read anything useful. I could not pronounce anything longer that three letters, and even most of those were incorrect. After I left that assessment session I had mixed feelings of depression, anxiety, failure and despondency. I felt as though I had wasted the past two years. It was truly disheartening. The woman who ran the school was a kind, French woman named Michelle. She had the most reassuring voice, someone who had encountered the midlife crisis language student before. She never said no to me. No one did. No one told me I was insane for wanting to do this, but she did ask in a voice that resembled Glenda the good witch from the film the Wizard of Oz “So, why do you want to study Russian?” (well Glenda, if she was from Paris.) As I explained my reasons, carefully laid, out she nodded in kind agreement. My instructions were to go home and discuss it with my husband and call her the next day to schedule a class. So a strange bit of hope emerged as I drove home. “Now I know. Now I will improve or it all ends here.”
So I made the decision, that I need this class. I am either going to really learn this or I am going to keep dabbling and not really make any kind of progress ever. For all the books and software you can purchase there is no substitute for a teacher and a class. There is also no substitute for practice and putting in the time every day to practice. Most people, while able to speak their native language often do know how it works. I was learning this was as much the case for me as it was for them. One of the dividends of this project is that I have learned more about the English language as I need to explain the finer point of grammar to my Russian friends. To be clear, I take the time to explain it whether they choose to use it is another story. If I had a dollar for every time one of my Russian friends tried to talk their way out of using definite articles I would own a lovely dacha by now. If I have to decline nouns and learn aspect of verbs they have to learn how to use “a,an & the”. But now it is time for me to get to work and either get serious or get out. I enroll for 10 weeks of classes, and prepare for ten of the most exciting and painful weeks since I did my clinical pastoral education in graduate school. This is going to hurt…and somewhere a Russian is smiling.