Why my language skills suck: Part 1
This is post 8 (of 10) for my August 2020 Challenge. We’re going back to the Reader Mailbag to answer one of my reader’s questions.
It’s actually one of those questions I get asked a lot by students and is very tricky to truthfully answer in 30 seconds or less. This happens a lot in the classroom – questions requiring intricate answers, for seemingly simple questions. ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What do you do in your free time?’ are much easier.
But ‘do you speak Ukrainian or Russian?’ can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes and tangents.
When I answer that my language skills are pretty poor and that I can merely ‘get by’, I often get puzzled looks that appear to say ‘What? Seriously? After 6, 7, 8, 9 and now 10 (!) years living in Ukraine, you can only ‘get by’?’
Actually, it’s worse: I’ve lived here nearly 11 years.
With the 10-year anniversary of me deciding to come to Kyiv upon us (I arrived here at the end of August 2010), what a great time to revisit my horrid language skills and what an embarrassment I am.
Part 1: Let’s look at a history of Darnell Pedzo’s language learning experience, going back to his school years and finishing with his first stint in Ukraine in 2005. (how thrilling!)
In Part 2, we’ll look at the period from 2006-present.
1994: I graduate from high school, in England, having studied Spanish for a year. And even though my grades were high, I could barely speak it. I knew the grammar well, could remember lots of words but as for actually stringing a sentence together? Forget it.
And for crying out loud, no disrespect intended here, but Spanish? Is there an easier language for an English speaker to learn?
1986-1989: jumping back in time. I lived in Spain for these three years.
Yet I still couldn’t speak Spanish. This ought to tell you something.
(okay, full disclaimer: I attended American schools and I had one semester of Spanish and one semester of Spanish history/culture – which I loved, especially the field trips to the Prado in Madrid, still one of my favourite ever art museums, but I’m not sure it was obligatory to actually study the language. Still, what a regret, eh?)
1994: I arrive at Tufts, considering whether to study History or International Relations. All students at Tufts, regardless of your degree of study, had to take at least one semester (or maybe two?) of a foreign language, but for IR students, the requirements were much more onerous. I think it was a full four years’ worth, if I’m not mistaken (Dr Wasabi Islam can correct me here).
I said ‘to hell with that!’
And studied Spanish for two semesters to tick off that requirement.
I mean, seriously…this really ought to tell you something about my poor attitude to learning languages.
(another story for another time: the outrageous flirting I used to do with my Spanish teacher, even asking her to be my academic advisor, despite having History as my degree. ‘But Daniel,’ she said. ‘I am not a history professor!’ I even took another semester of Spanish and then when we had a class outing at the end of the term to a Spanish tapas restaurant, I had way too much sangria and then proceeded to [editor’s note: end of story, this gets a bit saucy from this point on]…).
Needless to say, things were slightly awkward between us after that.
2002: I arrive at Edinburgh, to do a Master’s in International Politics. Thankfully, no language requirements. Yay!
2003: I was interested in international development and started looking around for jobs. I don’t think I found a single job that didn’t require fluency in at least another language, and most wanted fluency in three or more. At this point, I realised what an idiot I had been, and how not thinking ahead of the game was a disastrous idea – what, me plan my future?
Suddenly, I’m competing for jobs with people fluent in three, four languages. I started studying French. My then girlfriend and I were eyeing jobs in West Africa, and there always seemed to be interesting jobs going in Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Tunisia, with the African Development Bank. Fluency in French was a must.
2004: My self-studies were, I thought, going well. Despite having very little money, I decamped to the south of France for a few weeks, between Montpellier and Carcassonne, to immerse myself. I had a strict budget of around 15 euros a day, including accommodation. That was enough for a daily ration of:
* a cheap hostel
* a Le Monde newspaper, which I spent ages devouring
* two cappuccinos
* some bread and cheese from the supermarket, and occasionally a cheap kebab or pizza
* a beer every now and again
* a plastic bottle of 1.5 litre of wine (in France, this was still pretty good) – this might last me anywhere from a day to three.
I even managed to go to a Montpellier v Nice Ligue 1 match one evening.
I had fantastic language practice in Montpellier. In my hostel were a Moroccan and an Algerian, who were always stoned out of their heads. They spoke so slowly and were so chilled all the time: great listening practice, let me tell you. To this day, I often tell students – half-seriously – who struggle with their listening skills, to find some stoned speakers to talk to.
(although, as a caveat, don’t take this too far: in those days, to save money, I got around by hitching. On one journey on this trip, a woman in her mid-late 40s driving an old Volkswagen beetle gave me a lift. She was stoned out of her mind and drove around 15km/hour, hardly paying attention to the road, with some lovely chansons playing on the radio. Once I overcame my fears, I sat back, relaxed and had an enjoyable conversation.)
I always used to share my wine with a guy from Niger, who in turn shared his nuts and other snacks with me (stop it, behave - that’s not a euphemism!).
I left for Carcassonne and with money being tight, I was able to find free accommodation in a hostel in a small town outside the city, amidst the vineyards and rolling, meandering hills of Preixan. In return for free board and a bit of food, I had to do 3 hours of strenuous gardening work, with a couple of other fellow travelers.
The problem? One was Canadian, the other was English, and because it was a hostel, all sorts of [English-speaking] travelers came through.
I stopped speaking French. There was no one else to speak French with, except in the one or two bakeries in the town, but those conversations didn’t go far.
On the other hand, I had an incredible time and my fellow English speakers became good friends, and I met some of the funniest, strangest and most bizarre people of my life at that hostel, and the late night conversations we had until the wee hours are still some of the finest of my life. Even now, as I peruse my journal reflections, I can still vividly picture the characters I met and the laughs we had.
Later in 2004, my girlfriend and I got that long sought-after international development job.
In Nigeria.
Where they speak English.
Oh well.
Welcome to Ukraine
2005: my first full-time teaching job, September in Lviv. I went to western Ukraine because, among other things, I wanted to learn Ukrainian.
Let’s blame my teacher, shall we?
Here is where I start making paltry, unforgivable excuses. But please bear with me.
My school offered 10 free language lessons, in either Ukrainian or Russian. That was kind of them to give me a choice, but there was no way I was studying Russian in western Ukraine.
I bought a grammar book and had my notebook and was eager to get cracking. I wanted to start with my 10 lessons, to get the building blocks under my belt and then take more lessons from there. When I arrived in Lviv, I could hardly decipher the Cyrillic alphabet and had no idea what was what. I was clueless. I mean, look here at my first shopping list. My Ukrainian friends will no doubt cringe – I couldn’t even get the name of the city right:
But I’ve usually needed someone to kick me up the backside to spur me into action. Somehow I found the motivation to learn French on my own, but I had more resources at my disposal: a wide range of accessible, user-friendly books, CDs for listening practice, access to French newspapers, a collection of Baudelaire poems, a dual English-French Penguin reader. Ukrainian was a bit harder to come by, and I’m not the most social person in the world. I’m not good at just going out and speaking to strangers in public to practise my speaking skills. I like to sit, read, observe and let things happen (it worked wonders in France, at the start – in retrospect, maybe I should have stayed in Montpellier).
In western Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of people speak Ukrainian. At my language school, almost everyone spoke Ukrainian. There were one or two Russian-speaking teachers, and one of them was very eager for me to study Russian with her. She kept pushing me, and was insistent. But I politely declined and said I wanted to study Ukrainian.
One problem: this teacher, who became one of my favourite colleagues, was eager to teach me. The designated Ukrainian teacher? Less so.
Our first lesson got put off. And then again. And again. And before I knew it, it was late October, nearly two months after I’d arrived and we finally had our first lesson. We had our second the following week.
And from there, they happened sporadically, with frequent, last-minute cancellations from her, our lessons sputtering along inconsistently.
I think we – or I – gave up after five or six lessons, sometime in February.
This really is a feeble excuse, and to my credit, I did make some valiant attempts to study on my own. I went out a lot, on my own and tried to talk to people. But how far can a conversation go beyond the pleasantries? After the initial ‘what’s your name? what music do you like? what’s your favourite kind of cheese?’ there was little else to discuss.
My local Ukrainian readers may remember what Lviv was like in 2005 – nothing, and I mean nothing, was in English: street signs, restaurant menus, maps. The only tourists seemed to be Poles who came at the weekend. I was the proverbial big fish in a small pond: the only foreign English teacher at one of Lviv’s biggest language schools. I started frequenting some underground, smoky dive bars. I kind of became a very minor ‘celebrity’ in town, the only ‘native speaker’ (sic) around. Hardly a soul spoke English, but the handful who did wanted to chat with me in their mangled English. Some of my friends were students, current and former, and they just wanted to practise their English. I could have persisted, but I’m not the persistent type.
A friend suggested finding a non-English speaking girlfriend. So I asked out a woman from the gym. She had a pretty low level of English. We went on a date. She brought her friend along, ostensibly as a translator, but as it turned out, this friend was vetting me as a potential marriage partner, peppering me with all sorts of questions about my salary, goals, prospects, potential…that never went anywhere.
I asked out another woman on a bus. She actually gave me her phone number. We exchanged a few texts, but they were indecipherable. A colleague said she probably hadn’t enabled the Roman alphabet function on her phone, or there was a problem with my phone. Or she did this intentionally as a polite way of turning me down.
I dated another woman, but she spoke English. I later went out with a fellow teacher, who obviously spoke English. I seemed to be friends or romantically involved with all of Lviv’s English speakers.
The only thing I really developed was my food vocabulary – there was some benefit, clearly, to having to deal with Ukrainian-only menus. To this day, my food vocabulary is pretty damn good.
So, really, it wasn’t that teacher’s fault. Shame on me for even slightly blaming her.
27 October, 2005
One other thing, lurking in the back of my mind: from the very start, I was planning to leave Lviv when my contract was up in June 2006. As much as I liked living there, I wanted to venture somewhere else.
This is a theme that I have written about countless times on these pages: when I got my CELTA in 2005, I only intended to teach English for two years, in two different locations.
And now, fifteen years later, here I am, still.
Barely able to speak Ukrainian.
In Part 2, we’ll look at the post-Lviv years and move onto the present.
Read More
Ten years ago today I wrote this, where I wrapped up my time teaching summer school and, in the final section, talked about my options for where to go next.
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