Russian sheet music

When you are retired, you absolutely need hobbies, otherwise, you will get bored… and badger your spouse ad nauseam… with deadly consequences.

I have a few hobbies, among them linguistics, and I always have been relatively successful with some foreign languages… if they use Latin characters. But when faced with foreign alphabets (Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, Cyrillic, etc.) I get immediately thrown out of the game.

Since I live in a semi-Slavic environment, my latest project is to be able to read Russian text fluently. No small task my friends… comparable in my mind to Hercules’ 12 Labors.

The Russian language is a mixture of early Phoenician, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, with a few Latin-looking characters thrown in the pot for good measure. But these familiar-looking characters turned out to be false friends. A Russian B for example is pronounced like a Latin V, and a Russian P is really an R.

With a Cyrillic chart by my side, I can decipher a few Russian words with the ability of a First grader… But this is not enough. I can and I will do better.

One of the saving (and surprising) graces of Russian is that it has “borrowed” a lot of words from a wide variety of languages. When you can finally read some Russian text, you are surprised by the abundance of foreign words (mainly French). After a little research, I discovered quite a few Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Greek, Yiddish, and Arabic words.

So, the key to reading Russian is the ability to remember what each strange character sounds like. It is like a music sheet. But the older you are, the more difficult it is, for the Latin-sounding characters have become so ingrained in your mind that it is difficult to think of any other sound.

There is a Russian saying that goes “An old friend is better than two new friends “and to me, this also applies to any alphabet.

Like in any discipline, you need to start everything young. I envy the little nippers aged 4 or 5 who, without knowing how to read, are totally fluent in 2 or 3 languages. It is not fair, and it ought to be censured.

I will end my little lecture by quoting something I recently learned in Russian. To answer the question “Will I ever be able to read or speak Russian fluently?” a Russian would probably answer:

 Да нет, наверное (Yes no, probably)… probably never.

Da svidaniya druzya…

Alain