For those of you who may or may not be observant, you will notice that I changed the little subtag under the title of the blog. I kept the title becaues in all honesty, I've spent a good amount of time building up the name of the blog and so on and so forth, and I'd have to start all over if I changed the name. Anyway the point of this post is not to talk about blog titles, but to explain why I've changed the sub tag from "A record of my Experiences with Language" to "The Russian Odyssey..."
The main reason, well if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm going to be spending ten months with Rotary Youth Exchange in Russia, beginning in August. When that happens, This blog will switch to mostly talking about the experiences I'm having there. The reason I've changed it now, in February is because I've noticed that a lot of my posts lately have more to do with Russian, than with French, or any other language. Why? Probably because Russian has become my dominant language
No, this does not mean that I'm fluent in it, or that I speak it more than English. Let me explain. See, when I first started taking French, it became my "dominant" second language. This means that when I was thinking of phrases in foreign languages, and I couldn't think of a word in that language, my mind would automatically substitue a french word. And example of this might be "The dog runs in the park." If I were saying it in spanish "el perro corre en..." And I couldn't remember the word for park in spanish, then my mind would want me to say the word "le parque" in French instead.
For some reason though, the past few weeks Russian has steadily become more and more persistant. It's even begun to invade my french lately. I'll be driving to High school and trying to gear myself up for French by thinking of lovely french phrases. I'll be driving along and be thinking "the Weather is very cold" Only in french so it's "Le temps est..." And then out of the blue I'll mentally finish the sentance in Russian "очень холодная" and then I'm thinking "wait that's not right." It happens with more and more frequency in French class too. It's really frustrating when I know a French word, but all I can remember is the Russian word for it. I try not to encourage myself to make these half and half sentences because I'm worried if I do, I'll start speaking that way and the last thing I need is to be sitting there speaking 'fruchian.'
1 comment:
Lol. I know how you feel. For three years, I studied Japanese -- then Rotary sent me to Taiwan! It was a very...annoying...transition, actually. Chinese and Japanese have enough similarities (such as in particles for possession and past tense, etc.) that they became easily confused in my mind. The fact that my first host family spoke both Chinese and Japanese made me less inclined to use the new one, as well. I've been back in the US for almost a year now (...wow. Time flies...), and I'm thinking of switching back to Japanese, but at the same time... Well, I want to still be able to watch Taiwanese television, and listen to Chinese music with some comprehension. ^___^
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