My Multilingual Life

I was born and raised in Russia, in a monolingual environment. Yes, I studied foreign languages at school, of course, but, frankly, it was a waste of time. I studied French from the 1^st grade till the 9^th. I don’t remember anything. Well, perhaps, some basic words, but that’s it. I took Latin, Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic for a year in the 9^th grade. I don’t remember anything either. I started to learn English in the 10^th grade, and, though, I studied it for 4 years (two years of the university included), my knowledge was very poor. The thing is that I’m actually good at learning languages. How come at 21 I ended up not knowing a single foreign language? Well, I blame the educational system – considering that foreign language is mandatory in Russia on all levels of education you’d be surprised to see how many people are monolingual.

I always wanted to study abroad, but without English it would be impossible. So I decided to learn it. It was the summer after my graduation from the Ural State University (Philosophy major), all the courses in language schools started in fall, but I wanted immediate action. I got the first Harry Potter book in English (I’m a big fan of Harry Potter books, I read them countless times), which I’d read already in Russian (several times, yeah) and started to read. Well, read wouldn’t be an accurate word. Though I had some knowledge of vocabulary and a very vague idea of English grammar, still I had to look up almost every word in a dictionary. At the time I didn’t have an electronic dictionary, so I used a bulky volume of the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary. It took me one hour to get through the first page. Half a year after I was able to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in a few days without using any dictionary. But don’t assume that in half a year I understood English fluently. It was a long journey that still lasts and I learn every day.

Since then many things happened. From my monolingual environment I moved to Israel about two years ago. I study English literature at the Haifa University, and my basic day is divided between three languages – English (the language of my studies, reading for pleasure and watching TV-series), Russian (the language of my family and friends) and Hebrew (the language of the country, of my job and of many other kinds of interactions). Sometimes I have to speak all three languages in 10 minutes. When talking to my fiancée I am usually code-switching a lot, speaking a messy mix of Russian, Hebrew and English. I started to learn Spanish. I’m thinking of taking up Korean and Polish, and of reviving my French. I started to make mistakes in Russian (and I was proud of my almost flawless Russian before).

This blog is about my multilingual life, learning languages, funny episodes, challenges, losses and victories. Occasionally I’ll also write about the books I read and the shows I watch.