The Polyglot Ponders His Trajectory

Ian and I disagree as to what language he should study, outside of school, this academic year. I am pushing for Russian, as usual, partly because we live in a very Russian-centered world (being Russian Orthodox), and partly because I'm convinced that if he can learn Russian, almost any language - certainly almost any European language - will seem pretty easy by contrast. Moreover, once he learns a language with 31 letters, where the nouns have six cases and verbs have "aspect" as well as tense (it's not worth trying to explain it; I still don't entirely get it...), ever German with all its der-die-das will be within his grasp without having to ingest many new grammatical categories.

But no, he wants to learn Spanish. This is like God's sense of humor at work. When I was in seminary, and Russian was what we ate, drank and breathed, I would take a Spanish text to class with me and go over vocabulary when things got dull, which was usually when we were going through some drill of stuff I already knew. They really wanted us to practice our Russian, but I was much more interested in speaking Spanish with a couple of good-humored seminarians from Argentina (and one from Nicaragua) and a Russian monk who had lived in Venezuela. Now, any mention I make of studying Russian is greeted with a flood of Iberophilia by the Next Generation...

But Ian has a more nuanced sense of the philological landscape. He wants to study four languages: Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese, and he wants to study them in that order. One reason why he wants to study Russian and Chinese at the end of the program, is because of their striking similarity. The lad is convinced that Russian and Chinese have much in common, and studying them back to back will let him leverage the natural advantages of Russian for the neophyte sinologist.

How are Russian and Chinese similar? Apparently the "letters" - the Russian letters and Chinese characters are apparently much alike.

I don't know where he got that idea, but I think I can imagine; an American child taking on the Russian alphabet would likely feel as daunted by some of its letters as they would by some of the simpler characters of Chinese. I didn't break the news to him about tonal languages, but if he studies Russian first, he probably won't be overwhelmed by Chinese tones; Russian speech patterns are quite tonal in their own right, although it's more about conveying feeling than meaning.

(August/September, 2010)