Russian through American eyes

[gera.livejournal.com]

The piece below is from the book How to Learn Any Language:

There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named “Tiger” Titus, entered the room. After a formal “Good morning” he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard.
You could feel the group’s spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian’s “funny looking” letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the room.
“My soul!” exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the cafeteria later that day. “I’ve never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my life. Why, they’ve got v’s that look like b’s, n’s that look like h’s, u’s that look like y’s, r’s that look like p’s, and p’s that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n that’s really an e and an x that sounds like you’re gagging on a bone. They got a vowel that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings all the way out, and damned if they don’t even have a B-flat!”
The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university’s first Russian class. There were five.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/critic_/]

I have that book! I got a good laugh at that part once I had learned the Cyrillic alphabet...

[gera.livejournal.com]

Well, I can appreciate it too, especially now, that my 19-month old American-born daughter mastered the English alphabet and when she sees Russian letters she calls them by their English names. :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/critic_/]

That's too cute, in a comical sense =P

[juleyah.livejournal.com]

LMAO!! So cool! I remember when I learned the Cyrillic alphabet... I was fascinated, not scared at all... But above might be what my friends saw when they had a closer look at my Russian books! :P

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Poor people, what if they think what WE feel when we are taught that strange, inversed-looking LATIN alphabet which, leave alone its letters being so distorted and corresponded with the WRONG SOUNDS, lacks so many useful letters like Щ, Ы, Я... and this happens to poor us when we are seven years old!!!


:)))))))))))

[gera.livejournal.com]

Well, no wonder the Russian alphabet is richer since it's based on three alphabets: Latin, Greek and Hebrew. :)

[snowwhitetan.livejournal.com]

Haha, so true!;-)

[gera.livejournal.com]

And by the way, we were ten, when we started to learn English, not seven :)

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

I was six, and it was German. I had no English at high school.
At seven, we were taught Latin letters in the math class, in order to use it for a+b=x, x*y=z etc.

[gera.livejournal.com]

You must have learned in some special school :)
In standard schools we learned the Russian alphabet at seven (although I personally could read since I was four), and "foreign language" - either English or German starting from the fourth grade. And we didn't learn algebra until, I believe, the fourth grade... In any case, definitely not the first grade :)

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

If you add Hebrew, add Phinikian then, since both Greek and Hebrew come from that. Seriously, Russian alphabet is based strictly on Greek, with some letters invented by St.Cyril to represent the sounds absent in Greek. Latin alphabet derives from Greek as well (only some 1,200 years earlier than Cyrillic.)

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

What I was in was a "special school," but it specialized on German, not on math.
My son has English since the 1st grade (which now is when they're 6) in a more-than-regular, average public school.

[superslayer18.livejournal.com]

Aww but I kinda like Cyrillic (and I'm American ^_^). I think the Cyrillic alphabet was one of the things that I enjoyed learning the most. Unlike say... Japanese or something, it's pretty damn near impossible to learn Russian without learning the alphabet first. That teacher is smart though. He weeded out all the weak minded people first. If they would have stayed in the class, some of them probably would have brought the other students down just because they weren't as motivated or strongwilled as the others.

[gera.livejournal.com]

Well, it's been over quarter of a century since I was in the first grade... Things change :)
But back then this is how it was... They would only start learning foreign language in the first grade in special schools.

[wolfie-18.livejournal.com]

Pffft, that's the MAIN reasons I got started with Russian.

To me it was like "OMG! This B sounds like a V! COOL!" Heh heh...

[gera.livejournal.com]

I've never had to learn Russian as a foreign language, but in my opinion, the alphabet is pretty easy once you get past the psycohlogical barrier and the shock of the first day.
As far of as reading, it can't get any easier than Russian. But the grammar is pretty difficult, more difficult than the English one.
So my sympathy goes out to all of you Russian learners :)

[superslayer18.livejournal.com]

The Cyrillic alphabet is definitely not a difficult one to learn I think. The only problem that I really still encounter with it is that when I try reading aloud quickly, I'm fine at first but once I've been doing it for a little while and I'm still trying to do it quickly, it's very easy for me to read a P as a /p/ instead of as an /r/. Likewise for B and H.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

An article on the history of alphabets (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%84%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%82) in Russian part of Wikipedia: you can see here that both Latin (through Etruscian) and Cyrillic alphabet derive from Greek, and from nowhere else. All three of them derive from Phinikian anyway, and so does Hebrew, Devanagari etc.

[gera.livejournal.com]

(Финикийский = Phoenician).
Both Latin and Greek originate ultimately from an ancient Semitic alphabet, but this is not what I was talking about.
Three letters were borrowed directly from the Hebrew alphabet: ш , щ and ц.
It's actually pretty obvious, just look: ש צ.
The Russian language had those sounds and neither Greek nor Latin had letters for them.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Still remember one of my American friends on his very 1st day in Moscow -- the guy tried to read everything he encountered in the streets or in stores, so the stop sign (СТОП) went like "kton," and a bottle of Muscat wine (МУСКАТ) went like "my cat" :))

[schwarzer-tod.livejournal.com]

Don't you sort of grow up with it surrounding you, though? They don't bother transliterating a lot of English stuff, e.g. Playboy instead of Плейбой.

[gera.livejournal.com]

Here's (http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/azbuka-hist.html) what I am talking about:

[superslayer18.livejournal.com]

Which is your native language?

[juleyah.livejournal.com]

LMAO @ "my cat"!! I've done that too.. *blush*

[gera.livejournal.com]

There's a huge difference between what we grew up with and what you can read now on Russian Web sites :)
Back in those days Playboy wouldn't ever be mentioned other than, maybe, as an example of the complete decadence of the Western world and then it would definitely be transliterated. We weren't exposed to too much English outside our formal English classes. But on other hand at a certain age almost everyone knew Latin characters even if he did not know any language based on them.