Proper Russian

I’m reading The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall. The book is about how spacing correlates with culture. Nowadays we all know about intimate, personal and social distances, but Hall, I believe, was the first who started talking about such things.

In one chapter Hall describes fixed-feature space and how people organize layout of cities, villages and even internal layout of their houses. He says:

“The layouts of villages, towns, cities and the intervening countryside is not haphazard but follows a plan which changes with time and culture. Even the inside of the Western house is organized spatially. Not only are there special rooms for special functions – food preparation, eating, entertaining and socializing, rest, recuperation? And procreation – but for sanitation as well… Actually the present internal layout of the house, which Americans and Europeans take for granted, is quite recent. … rooms had no fixed functions in European houses until the eighteenth century. Members of the family had no privacy as we know it today. There were no spaces sacred or specialized.”

I was born in the Soviet Union and spent my childhood in a soviet commi-block. My parents had two room apartment at the seventh floor of 9-storied house. We had no bedrooms – rooms that are dedicated for sleeping only. The room where my parents lived was also a living room, where TV and a piano stayed and where parties took place. I shared another room with my elder sister. It was a very typical apartment, most of my friends had ones with the similar internal layouts. When my sister got married, she and her husband moved to the smaller room and I moved to the parent’s room. Again, it was not something extraordinary, many families shared flats. One room per family was taken for granted. And, you know, we lived a happy life. None of us suffered from the lack of privacy. I was a teenager when we moved to a bigger apartment and I got my own room.

I really don’t think that our living conditions were awful. They were just different. Today, my husband and me live in a three room flat, that is just Ok. Less would be very uncomfortable, as we both work at home and need a space at least to put all our equipment. Why my parents and me felt good living in a tiny, overcrowded apartment?

I think, the main reason is that we didn’t have a concept of privacy those days. The culture was different, and the spacing was different too.

In my school, back in 1990-th, a teacher of German language was a native German from Bavaria. When we started learning “house and home” lexicon, he brought photos of Bavarian houses – nice private mostly two-story houses sinking in flowers. For us, they looked unreal, like fairytale, as all we lived in ugly old soviet condos. The teacher asked us if we wanted to have homes like those in the photos, expecting positive answers from us. To his surprise, my classmates said “No, no way.” They explained, “Living in a house isolated, separated from everyone would be too boring and even frustrating”. I think, this illustrates the concept of spacing and privacy very well. I should admit, it changed very fast when the soviet time passed by.

“I’m gonna read Odnoetazhnaya America (One-storied America) by Ilf and Petrov,” my husband said a few days ago. “I think, you’ll be disappointed,” was my response. “What could the two satirical novelists write about America in 1935? How badly black people were treated there? What a poor and miserable life working people lived in the capitalistic world?” I thought. I should admit, I was wrong. The book happened to be an unbiased, very interesting depiction of America’s thirties.

The history of the trip

Ilya Ilf and Evgeniy Petrov traveled through the depression-era United States, from New York to California and back, by automobile. They were taking photos and writing their travelogue during the two-months journey. “How could this trip become possible?” one more or less familiar with the living in the Soviet Union might ask. In 1935, well into the era of communism, political terror and repressions, the two Russian satirical writers came to the U.S as special correspondents for the Soviet newspaper Pravda. As I learned from the editor’s note, in 1935 the United States and the Soviet Union felt mutual interest to each other. The Soviet Union needed American technologies, while America was suffering from the Depression and seeking for any way out. The short period of time when the two countries didn’t treat each other like the worst enemies was the best for Ilf and Petrov to take the trip and discover America.

The history of the book

When Ilf and Petrov returned home, they published their work in Ogonyok, the Soviet equivalent of Time magazine. A bit later the book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (Single-Storied America) was published and immediately translated into English under the title Little Golden America. For unknown reasons, the first edition of the book did not include the photographs. Ilf died shortly after the trip to America; Petrov died in a plane crash in 1942 while he was covering the Second World War as a journalist. Then the Cold War came, and Soviet press started drawing America in the darkest colors only. Ilf and Petrov’ mild humor and playfulness were not appropriate in the USSR any more. The photos would be lost forever, but in 2003 Erika Wolf, a historian of Soviet art, gave a call to the Cabinet Magazine and asked if they wanted to publish a chapter from the forgotten photo-essay (Ogonyok version). This is how the book Ilf and Petrov’s American road-trip began.

Why this is still interesting

Though Ilf and Petrov took their trip to America long ago, their book and photos are still very interesting. You’ll find a very detailed depiction of America’s everyday living in thirties there. While traveling, the writers met many famous people and visited remarkable places like Mark Twain museum, Ford factory, Mexican and Indians settlements, Hollywood and the roof of the Empire State Building. America is quite recognizable in their book despite seven decades passed by!

What I liked most is how Ilf and Petrov described their first impressions of America and Americans – what a brilliant example of cross-cultural communications! When I visited the USA for the first time, I felt exactly the same what Ilf and Petrov felt (however, they wrote about their feelings much better than I could).

Read more about Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip:

• Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers
• Goodreads
• Google Books
• Cabinet Magazine

My colleagues from outside Russia are all offline in their IMs and Skypes, there are much fewer emails in my inbox, my phone keeps silence since December 24th. What a contrast compared to what it was just a few days ago!

In Russia, people are still working hard to get all things done until the last day of the year. Russia is celebrating New Year on December 31st and Orthodox Christmas on January 7th. This Year Russia officially is on vacations from December 31st to January 10th.

When I was a kid, long winter vacations were a student privilege only. My parents and all other adults had working hours shortened on December 31st and were back to work on January 2nd . Soviet Union was an atheistic country, so nobody celebrated Christmas. In our family it was only me, a student, who could enjoy the whole ten days of vacations skiing, skating, snow-balling and, when the weather was extremely cold for outdoor activity, reading books, that I liked (and still like) very much.

By the end of the Soviet Union, Orthodox holidays was officially returned to our life, and January 6th -7th, Orthodox Christmas, got a status of a non-working days. Sometimes, days between the New Year and Christmas are working days, and sometimes holidays are prolonged for a week or even longer.

There is another winter holiday in Russia and some other countries – Old New Year, the start of the New Year by the Julian calendar, January 14th. Russia has adopted Gregorian calendar back in 1918. The Orthodox Church continued using Julian calendar, so “old style holidays” and “new style” holidays coexist since 1918. Many people do not link Old New Year to the Orthodox Church calendar. Thus my parents explained me that in tzar’s Russia people had a calendar that differed from the one used in rest of the world. Then Soviet Russia turned its calendar up in order not to lag behind other countries for two weeks. The Old New Year is an unofficial holiday, however the tradition of celebrating the coming of the New Year twice is widely enjoyed. If you have business with Russia, note that on January 14th, many companies may cut their working hours and have a nice, informal party.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and happy, healthy and prosperous New Year 2009!

Many people told me that Russian language is difficult to learn. Well, it is not exactly so. First, there are no articles in Russian. No a/the, der/die/das/ein/eine and other puzzles. Second, Russian has only three grammatical tenses — past, present and future. The last one encouraging note is about Russian alphabet (it is called Cyrillic): we have the whole five same letters with Latin alphabet. They are: A (like a in father), E (like ye in yet), K (like k in kitten), M (like m in map), and O (like o in not). I’m through with good news.

Frankly, if I were not a native speaker, I would never learn Russian. This language is too irregular, too irrational. Russian spelling follows three different logics (interesting, what would Mr. Sapir and Mr.Whorf say about this?) — morphological principle, phonetic principle (what I spell is what I hear) and sometimes historical principle. As a result, we get many rules and even more exceptions.

Russian grammar is pretty complicated. Nouns in Russian have three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), however a large number of words can be easily identified both as masculine and feminine. Russian is one of a few languages that have a category of animacy. Russian nouns can be animate or inanimate. Hypothetically, many years ago people used animacy to mark if the referent of the noun is alive or not. In modern Russian, the word “corpse” (труп) is inanimate, the word “deadman” (мертвец) is animate, however, obviously, the referent of both these words is not alive anymore. Russian syntax is based on free word order that means only that there’s no universal scheme “subject – verb – object”. Words in Russian sentences can be put in any order you like, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no rules. Russian word order depends strongly on what you want to say. In other words, the word order expresses the logical stress, and the degree of definiteness. Let me stop here.

When I was a child, I learned Russian knowing nothing about genders, tenses, logical stresses and communicative intentions. My parents talked to me, I listened to them and repeated after them. Most kids learned speaking very well at age of 3 or 4. I’ve been learning English since 10, at school and at the university. I learned grammar rules and word usage. And know what? My English is still not so good as my Russian.

“Be like children” is a good advise. The only one way to learn language is to use it. It is like dancing – you should dance to learn dancing. You would never start dancing well if you learned dancing from books only. If you listen to native speakers, read books, watch movies, and, try speak and write the language you are studying as frequently as possible, your memory works for you. Step by step, you remember words and their combinations from fiction, pop songs etc. Practicing this way, you unavoidably start speaking the language soon and choose correct grammatical forms automatically. It’s just a question of how often you use the language. So, there are no difficult languages in the world.

Culture is what we often take for granted. Normally, we live and communicate in a semi-automatic mode, producing standard reaction for regular stimuli and predicting others’ behavior easily. We play social games every day and rarely care of rules – we’ve learned them from the early childhood. We start thinking of culture only when something goes wrong. I.e. negotiations with business partners from another country failed for unknown reason. Or managers of a global company faced strong and irrational resistance from the staff etc. You may be aware of cultural differences in theory, but real practice of cross-cultural communication is always (and often unpleasantly) surprising.

Mr. Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist and cultural researcher, has a great experience in solving cross-cultural problems, grounding anthropological theorizing in concrete examples. Beyond Culture is his third book summarizing years of direct experience in inter-cultural communications.

When I bought Beyond Culture, I thought that this book is good to begin cross-cultural studying with. I didn’t expect to get any practical use of it. I was wrong. Besides expanding my knowledge of communicative linguistics and other related sciences, I learned how to recognize cultural issues in my everyday work, I got deeper understanding of behavior of my colleagues from other countries. I really found this book very helpful. However, Beyond Culture is not a how-to sort of books. I’d say, this is a why-guidance to cross-cultural communication — it explains why misunderstanding happens, why miscommunication occurs. It helps to take a fresh look at routing things. It teaches to distrust the common sense which is, in fact, not so common.

Written an a popular manner, this book deserves attention of everyone who works globally and deals with more than one culture.

Do you learn foreign languages and want to improve your pronunciation? Are you a journalist an need to check how to pronounce unfamiliar names and places? Or may be you are a linguist and research dialects and accents? If you answer “yes”, visit Forvo. If you answer “no”, well, visit Forvo anyway, just to have fun.

Forvo is a social pronouncing dictionary. Social means that users can add new words to the website and contribute pronouncing. The idea is to put together all words in the world pronounced by native speakers. Forvo has launched in early 2008. By that moment, there are 113.780 words with 55.928 pronunciations in 196 languages and more than 5000 collaborators in this project.

Everyone can add the word and request native speakers for pronouncing, everyone can record pronouncing and submit it to the site. You do not need to be a registered user to contribute your records, but registered users get more features at Forvo, like tracking your words or notifications and getting a rating. Languages are also ranked by popularity (English is a leader, Russian, my native language, is on the15th place).

Forvo offers nice features and tools:

• Geolocation – each user can map his accent (Google map’s interface)
• A special flash applet for recording, so you do not need any additional software to record your pronouncing
• Tags and search engine to make the work with the site easy and comfortable.

Like any social project, Forvo is a nice place to collect raw data and analyze it. For example, Forvo developers publish top search words and other interesting statistics regularly on their blog.

I personally want to thank Forvo for the brilliant idea. I’m the happiest Forvo user as I learn foreign languages, I’m a journalist and linguist. Definitely, forvo.com tends to appear at the top lines of my frequently opened pages.

Automatic translation — translation produced without the intervention of human translators — usually is not very good. Funny mistakes, wrong word usage and word linking — this is what machine translation offers today. You can not use automatically translated texts in official documents, but if you need to understand what the text written in a foreign language is about, automatic translation is enough.

If you need to translate a web page, email or any other text document from Russian into English and you don’t expect to get smooth text, you may use free online translators. Here are two online translation web services that work quite well:

Promt — online translation tools developed by a Russian software company. Promt offers free text translation service for English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Italian and Russian languages. You can translate plain text by typing or pasting words into the field on this page. You may enter URL here to translate the whole web page or use the special form to translate and send email directly from the server. Promt also offers WAP translation tools for mobile devices.

Google Translate works with dozen languages, but Russian is available only in English-Russian and Russian-English directions. Google Translate has a very interesting, social engine: people can offer Google better translations, so day by day Google is improving its translation tools with the help of its users. The more texts are translated by Google, the better translation we will get. By now Google is very good in news translating, financial reports and tech documentations. Google offers plain text and entire web-page translation.

Thus, if you find a web page in Russian and it is promising to be interesting, don’t pay to translators, try free online translation first.

Nobody can know about every news site on the Web. Even Google doesn’t know about all news sites. However, Google bots know and track many more sources than any Internet user has ever visited. Google Alerts service is the best solution for those who don’t want to miss any important news.

Say, you’re interested in any information published on the web about the movie “Devil Wears Prada” and you need to track all feedbacks on this movie. Put the title of the movie to the “Search terms” field at Google Alerts Service. Then tune service’s setting to your needs – select types of sources you want to monitor (news, blogs, web pages, or comprehensive), select how often you want to get alerts from Google and then enter your email address. That’s it. Since now Google will send you alerts informing you that a new article on defined topic appears at some website you’ve probably even never heard of. An alert message from Google includes URL and a short summary, that allows you to understand if you need to click the link and read the full text of the news.

Imagine, you’re interested in, say, pharmaceutical market. You might need to read earning reports of the most influent pharmaceutical companies. You know where these companies publish their reports at, however, you don’t know when exactly they update their websites. Unfortunately most these websites do not provide with RSS feeds. So you could add these websites to your bookmarks and visit them five times a day in order not to miss important information. Is there any way to optimize your work? Actually there is one.

You can automatically monitor any web page for updates with the help of ChangeDetection website. It is as easy as 1-2-3: click the link at this page to open a ChangeDetection wizard, put the URL of the web page you want to monitor and your email on the pop-up form. That’s it. You’ll get an alarm from ChangeDetection as soon as the page is updated.

I use ChangeDetection to monitor four or five pages for changes. It’s not too many, I could do it manually, however, I don’t trust my memory. I’m sure, I’d forget to visit these websites and check for updates. You know, there are so many interesting things to do, let’s robots do routine work!

Getting news in time, being updated is very important to run business properly. News monitoring is definitely a part of our everyday work. In some situations the price of a missing news article would be too high, thus we try to keep an eye on relevant subjects and not to miss anything important. Is it possible to track all news from thousands websites? Yes. Today we have some very simple and powerful tools that allow us to track news fast and effective.

RSS

Wikipedia said,

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

In other words, RSS gives you a possibility to collect websites you visit regularly to your customized “newspaper”. You can read new entries from your favorite sites within one program or at one web application instead of visiting every single website separately. Alexandra Samuel wrote a perfect guide — 10 simple, painless steps to becoming an RSS user. I don’t want to retell her article here, just would strongly recommend reading it.

This is how I use RSS for news tracking:

1. First of all, I added about 30 feeds of the the most noteworthy news sites to my RSS reader (special program or web service for aggregating RSS feeds).
2. I turned on “Check all feed once an hour” option in program settings, because some feeds may contain not all new entries, but last 10, so I asked RSS reader to check for updates every 60 minutes.
3. I set my RSS reader to start automatically on system start up — it keeps running in the system tray displaying a number of new entries as they arrive.
4. Three or two times a day I open the RSS reader and look through the news; some feed entries contain a title, short excerpt and a link to the full article on the web. If a news seems important, I opened it in my browser.

I spend about 30 minutes a day reading hundreds news from dozens of websites. Just imagine, every 60 minutes my RSS reader checks each of 30 websites for updates. I’d have no time for any other work if I did it manually, but it takes me only 30 minutes a day!

RSS feeds are just one of the tools I use for news tracking. Next time I’ll write how to track news from websites that do not provide with RSS feeds.