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The English Teacher is Learning English from Russians

By squeakyrobot

I never thought I’d be in Russia teaching English. Not that I was ever opposed to the idea; it just never even occurred to me. But I’m grateful that it eventually did.

I work with two separate, unrelated groups every week. On Wednesdays I travel to Vasilievsky Island to meet with a lawyer and her daughter, a pair I met via my program. The woman, Veronika, is very kind and loves to travel. She wants to learn English to aid her travels and she wants her 12-year old, Ksenia, to speak it simply for the opportunity and general usefulness. I’m less of a teacher with them and more of a conversation partner. We drink tea, eat, and talk at the dinner table. We watch How I Met Your Mother. They ask me about the States, I ask them about Russia. I hope I needn’t point out that the whole thing is mutually beneficial.

On Tuesdays, it’s more of a formal job that a friend hooked me up with. It’s a classroom-type deal where I get paid ten bucks an hour to conduct conversations and grammar lessons with five students of different ages. I receive a lesson plan every week, and we discuss the questions and bullet-points on that plan. We’ve already covered business, relationships, travel, hobbies, and food. Sometimes we get philosophical (“what is the wisest lesson you’ve learned?”). For two hours every Tuesday night, I sit, I listen, I correct, and I explain. I ask if I’m speaking too fast. I speak slower when they say I’m speaking too fast.

These weekly meetings have lifted my stay in Petersburg to something more than a cultural experience. They’ve become means to truly examine these languages and all that that may imply. They make me think about Russian and English and how they’re connected, because, like all languages, they most certainly are. As a linguist at heart, these meetings help me not only learn Russian but learn more about Russian. They catapult my understanding of the language’s history, quirks, and complexities into something more than superficialities like being able to order dinner or speak on the telephone. Watching my Russian students make mistakes, I know why they’re making those mistakes, why they omit a “the” or add an “a”. All this amounts to the possibility that I’ll one day become an informed Russian speaker, no different than any Muscovite, who knows what she’s saying and why she’s saying it that way.

And these lessons, of course, make me think about English – a language that I’m fluent in but happen to know very little about. I never before thought about the difference between “extra” and “surplus” or why the word “friend” doesn’t denote gender, which can potentially makes things confusing. I realize now that English is quirky and lawless and I commend people who want to learn it. In turn, I myself am learning English. Who would've thought?

Finally, these meetings reaffirm a fact that I’ve known for a long time: languages are fluid, not concrete. No one speaks any language perfectly, and no one ever will. Languages are like a series of levels, rising when you practice and speak, falling when you don’t. Being a polylinguist, all I know is that speaking any language well is a lifelong endeavor but always a worthwhile one.