LEARNING RUSSIAN
By ALAN MORAY WILLIAMS
LONG regarded as the Everest of European languages, Russian has been challenged since June 22nd, 1941, by a regular host of linguists, many of whom would certainly not have attempted it had historical events worked otherwise. The number of those now learning it, ranging as they do from schoolboys and undergraduates to men in the forces and students of night classes, it probably runs into tens of thousands. Many who set out will not get farther, it is safe to prophesy, than the base-camps of grammar and elemen- tary reading. Lack of time and/or industry may reduce those who attain the upper slopes of the mountain to a select few. But it is certain that the entente with Russia has given a tremendous stimulus to Slavonic studies and that there is every likelihood of the interest not diminishing but increasing. This article is an attempt by a student of Russian to outline the position of those in Britain who wish to learn the language ; the complications in its structure which have given it its reputation for difficulty ; and the speediest means of overcoming them.
People have often been deterred from starting Russian by the Cyrillic alphabet bogey. A language with a different alphabet must inevitably be harder to learn than one with a normal one—such is the implication. In actual fact the alphabet is one of the least of Russian's difficulties. Of its 31 letters not more than 18 are un- familiar to English eyes ; and if it is borne in mind that Russsian B equals English V, P equals R, H equals N and C equals S, the remainder do not require more than a few hours' practice to master. An agreeable surprise in tackling Russian is the declension of verbs. This is considerably easier than that of French, German, Italian, or even English, having only one tense which declines and the remainder being almost invariable in form. The declension of nouns and adjectives on the other hand is more complicated. In addition to the four cases of, say, German (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), there are two additional ones: the instrumental (corre- sponding more or less to the Latin ablative) and the prepositional (used after certain prepositions). Nouns and adjectives vary in their forms and there are many rules and exceptions for them.
The chief difficulty of Russian, however, consists not in grammar or pronunciation (of which more anon) but in acquiring vocabulary. A language with for the most part totally different stems is bound to give more trouble to the linguist than one like French or German with many similar ones. Isolated words like mat' (mother), sestra (sister), sedlo (saddle) bear traces of a common origin ; modern acquired words such as pianino (piano) and mebel (French meuble) are easily spottable ; and the building up of " compound " words by prefixes and suffixes is much the same as in English. But the bulk of Russian words are drawn froth stems unknown to us. The result is that even after studying Russian for three or four years people may still find themselves unable to get through a novel or magazine article without frequent recourse to a dictionary. And it is this, together with pronunciation problems, and not grammatical complications, which has given Russian its gruesome reputation. Having decided to learn Russian, the beginner looks around him for means. Usually his first step is to buy a grammar. Several present themselves, the best probably being that of Anna Semeonoff (Dent) though those by Birkett, Forbes and Kolni-Balozky are also in common use. Hugo's self-taught booklets are interesting as an experiment besides being useful as an adjunct, but few would agree that it is possible really to learn Russian " without a master," let alone in three months. For Russian pronunciation is something of a bugbear and takes a long time to acquire without native tuition. When the latter is unobtainable, gramophone records can be a great help, and two good courses have been made, one by Linguaphone and one, on H.M.V., by Boyanus and Jopson ; but most people are able to get teaching either from a Russian (there are several thousand White Russian emigrants resident in Britain) or through the Slavonic faculties of the various universities, the most enterprising of which— that of London—opens its doors generously to all who seek help of this kind.
For those, the majority, who cannot get or cannot afford much tuition from a native, the ideal is probably a combination of various methods : an hour or two a week's coaching from someone competent to give it ; concentrated work on their own at grammar and reading ; plus, if possible, practice by listening to gramophone records. The latest auxiliary to learning Russian is given by a correspondence course. The lessons, which are based on Semeonoff's grammar, are moderate in price and enable students who would otherwise be out of touch with any teacher to have their work attended to. Service men and women are being allowed to make use of it—War Office Course U 39 A is, I believe, its Army name—and there has been enrolment for it from places as far apart as the Isle of Wight and the Orkneys.
After describing the difficulties which confront the linguistic mountaineer, it is as well to mention the objects, the rewards, which spur his weary feet upwards and onwards. There is first—as in real climbing—the final satisfaction of having accomplished something long and laborious, something moreover which few others have accomplished. For despite the large number of immigrants in Britain, events have shown the supply of good Russian speakers to be below the demand. There are varied possibilities of war-service jobs, some of them good and exciting ones ; of openings in Russia after the war ; and of immediate opportunities of interpreting, trans- lating, &c., not to mention teaching. Any such posts require not a superficial but a thorough knowledge of Russian—the ability, say, to read non-technical books and newspapers without dictionaries and to speak fluently and reasonably correctly. But the goal is worth the labour required to reach it.
Another inducement to learn Russian is, of course, Russian litera- ture. Neither‘Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky lose much in translation- Tolstoy's original Russian is itself often execrable, since he had a habit of mentally translating from the French—but Turgenev, the Lermontov of A Hero of Our Time, and other prose writers acquire greatly increased charm if read in the original. And of course the treasures of Russian poetry—that of Pushkin and his successors— are inaccessible to all who do not know the language. Not enough has been heard here about Soviet literature. Much of it has, it is true, been experimental and rather naïve and formless ; but for all that it has qualities of sincerity, genuineness and sometimes inspiration which are not to be found in many British and French writers of the last twenty years. Mayakovsky was one of the most important European poets of his generation, and if novelists such as Fedin, Leonov, Olesha and Sholokhov are not of comparable technical excellence they have none the less made experiments in both matter and manner refreshingly new to English readers.
We who have learnt Russian feel ourselves to be a spearhead in the attempt to understand and interpret the great country which has become our ally. We would like to see, not after the war but now, young Soviet students sent over here to study before being called up, and our own students sent to Russia in exchange ; and by that and similar means the 25-years-old barrier of mutual unintelligibility smashed once and for all. Is it too impossible a dream?
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