This is the fourth of six observations at Concordia Language Villages, summer language immersion programs in Russian and thirteen other languages.
There’s nothing quite like participating in a language lesson when you don’t speak the language beyond “good day,” “thanks,” and “goodbye.” To be fair, I can also say with confidence, in Russian, “There’s the ceiling!” But to tell the truth, I haven’t yet found a context to use that sentence meaningfully.
Yulia gives me a quick overview of the class as we walk from breakfast to the classroom. The classroom is in a cabin in the Minnesota northwoods, with lots of windows. Turtle River Lake is visible across the path, there are oak trees and pine trees and a gentle wind. It’s sunny, this is summer in Minnesota on the lake.
The five high school students, their teacher, and I leave our shoes by the door and sit around a table. Yulia starts with a familiar song, the students jump in. I take a peak at the text, but, well, Russian is written in Cyrillic. Sometimes I can sound out the words, thanks to Duolingo, but if the words aren’t cognates with English, that’s about as far as I get. The meaning hides behind a screen of Russian.
I have a better shot at understanding the next activity. Vocabulary of family members, on cards, are laid on the table in two teams. браt, сесtра, сын, папа …. These I can recognize. Although the rules of the game aren’t entirely clear, it seems to follow many other card games I know, where players ask each other if they have an x or y (a particular family member in this case), and if they are lucky they get to play a card. If they are unlucky, the person they have asked gets to play a card. The game has therefore minimal prompts (the family vocabulary words) but lots of language required from each player. As the students push up against the limits of their Russian ability, Yulia helps with encouragement and vocabulary words. She is pulling Russian out of them, I guess you could say. She is getting more from them then they would produce if she weren’t there at the corner of the table, learning in, managing both the game and the learning. She repeats what they say, she pushes them to go further.
There are lots of smiles, lots of pronunciation help. Students repeat after Yulia, she breaks words down into syllables to help them out.
The class is working on grammatical cases, as well as vocabulary, which I get when the student right of me answers “instrumental” in English. I know that’s a case in Russian grammar which requires certain endings on nouns. ”xорошо,” says Yulia, with great emphasis. “Good!” She’s happy with their effort, they are indeed all involved, thinking, trying. Yulia gives them time to work things out among themselves, figuring out the right endings to the vocabulary she writes on the board.
There isn’t any raising of hands here. Students contribute in a way you would in any conversation, answering Yulia, yes, but also checking with each other, talking with each other. I suppose that’s also a function of the size of the class, just five. I’m not sure if I should think of that as a luxury or if I should think of class sizes of 30 and more as a failure of the way classes are usually set up.
“что это?” asks Yulia, holding up a simple, blank Venn Diagram, her eyebrows raised with the question. “это Venn Diagram,” the students answer and Yulia smiles. “по-русски: диаграмма Венна.“ She preps them for the activity by reading prompts, which the students repeat. She corrects pronunciation at times. She checks grammar. Then they are ready for the “Diagramma Venna.”
Learning a language is a monumental undertaking. Think of all the words there are to know. Each language has a word for everything, after all. And putting together those words in ways that make sense requires a fair number of rules. Unless you are learning a constructed language like Esperanto, the language existed long before we did our best to describe it in terms of a set of rules. There are, therefore, always exceptions, always things that are a bit more complicated than they would need to be. The language wasn’t engineered as much as grown, or rather, simply grew. People are a good way for a language to make more language, you might say, to borrow a formulation I first read in a Richard Dawkins’ text, something like a human is a good way for a gene to make more genes. An evolutionary metaphor is pretty appropriate.
Linguists of the Lingthusiasm podcast devoted a good stretch of one episode to an interesting discussion about constructed languages. Constructed languages are ones people make up, for a book or movie or just for fun. The podcast hosts made the point that the first thing they would do to tell a constructed language from a natural language would be to look for exceptions to grammatical rules. If there aren’t exceptions, the language is not a naturally occurring language. Exceptions are a defining characteristic, exceptions are a feature of language. A language learner might want to embrace that complexity, looking for general patterns, avoiding the sheer amount of information necessary to memorize all the exceptions. This is in line with the applied linguists who recommend emphasizing communication over grammatical study, something they sometimes refer to as language acquisition instead of language learning. It’s all about recognizing patterns with fuzzy edges. Language as a system, and systems thinking, then, as an approach.
There are ripples on the surface of the lake, the leaves lightly flutter. A fan oscillates above us in the way of fans, there are the shoes piled by the door, a guitar in the far corner and several hoodies and beach towels hanging from dowels next to a red lifeguard rescue float of foam. Summer camp.
But summer camp in Russian. While I was thinking about the nature of language learning the Venn Diagrams have filled up. The students share what they have written. Yulia uses the opportunity now and again to practice declensions and a few conjugations. She continues helping with pronunciation. She also checks the writing of the students next to her, making notes where the spelling could use a little attention.
One last thing about language learning. Getting familiar with a language is a process of discovering how the language has chosen to make sense. As you get more familiar with a language you slowly reveal its quirks and tics, moving from opaque and odd to familiar and comfortable. In the process, the speakers of those languages become a bit more familiar, more understandable. Language learning demystifies the speakers of a language. In this manner, language learning is a means to reduce prejudice, to understand how we get the same things done, differently, and how we do different things similarly.