I *could* spell cat

Like everyone else, I’m working from home. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot I can do from home. The official case number in Belarus is rising steeply. Today, it’s about 16k and going up by about 1k daily. Those cases fall under “being treated” or something like that; there is also a figure of “recovered and discharged” and there’s no a lot of clarity of the honest total of diagnosed cases.

Anyway, point being, whatever number we have is now shooting up, so whereas a couple weeks ago it was fine to go into the office, now it’s riskier. As a result, I am stranded in my lovely apartment doing my best to not waste taxpayer money by doing absolutely nothing.

My days thus far have been filled with taking random online classes offered by our department learning institute. These are fun, interesting and sometimes enlightening, but not directly related to my job. I’ve been working here for over six years and have, this whole time, been taking classes that are related to my day-to-day duties, so I ran out of those long ago. I moved next to things that were interesting that, in a perfect world, I would do or at least benefited from learning about, like how to take more interesting pictures, how the consular section works and about some of the online programs I use.  

Those had value for me, but now I am sort of regulated to taking the most least interesting. Really, we’re taking about 2-10 hours classes with such titillating titles as “fundamentals of contractor-held property” and “centrally billed accounts training.” Some were no-brainers but relevant, like how to use an emergency radio (which I’ve been using for years now), but in all, I’ve been really scraping for the past week or two.

Fortunately, as part of the regular, non-COVID calendar, the summer class schedule included a “mentored” Russian class that’s 14 weeks long. I signed up for this while I has been going into the office daily, but now I am so glad I got accepted.  (I have no idea if they turn anyone down, but I had to fill in a justification of why I should be able to take it.) Technically, it starts on May 11 (Daddy’s birthday), but we got access to the course materials early.

The class is designed for people who have no knowledge or ability in Russian. I have very little ability, but after six months, I do have some knowledge, so the idea of going through the alphabet again is a bit disheartening. After checking out the materials, it appeared that I needed to go through every little screen to “get credit” for it, so I spent two hours on the first half of the alphabet (again). There are three screens with activities for every letter, and I made no shortcuts and did all of it.

The next day, I went back and discovered a different way to enter the course, which was through the mentor’s “homeroom” link. This time, I went in that way and it too me ALL THE WAY back to the beginning of the alphabet. Heavy sigh. I had to start over. I did, shortcutting (but still completing) the screens I’d gone through and then being thorough when I got to the last half. I ran out of daylight, shut it down and came back the next day.

Well, now, I cannot figure out how to maneuver to that “homeroom” link again. I went back in the browser history to try and then went through all the “practices” for the block letters but they didn’t register as completed in the “objectives” part of the course, so it looks like I haven’t even started. I’ve asked the mentor but it’s a very narrow question and I don’t guess I described it correctly because he sent me a different link (the one for the conference calls once we get going).

Dejected, I pushed forward anyway. The practices were incredibly hard for me; my language problem is not reading but speaking and spoken – I can’t pronounce and I can’t understand people talking. I can know someone is telling me, “I want two cups of black coffee with sugar please,” and understand the “I want” and “please” and possibly, maybe, the “coffee,” but the rest is just noise. Even playing the phrase in slow speed (thank you, Mango Languages) and staring at the words on the screen, I cannot tell what it is. Not good at all. One of the practices was to spell a word that was dictated. I had absolutely no idea what the first one was. The best I could guess was it had two syllables. I was right on that, but utter fail on the rest.

Speaking is not as bad but still brutal. I can sound out words very slowly, one syllable at a time, but I have trouble talking as fast as, say, the Mango Languages voice. I cannot tell you how many times I repeated “I like brown bread” last night and I still couldn’t match the speed.

Some letters complicate it for me, too. Especially vowels. There is a vowel that looks like an English “e” but it has two dots over it. That vowel hates me, as does one that looks like a backwards capital “N” with a squiggle over it. It’s a multi-talented vowel because every word it seems to represent a different sound.

And I need to know how to understand, more so than reading, I think. When I go into the doner place nearby and ask for “one schwarma” – which I can say – they come back with a follow-up question and I am lost. As I have yet to not walk away with a schwarma, it’s not like it’s life or death, but it’s really frustrating. This is so, so hard for me.

But I am plugging along, using several forms of learning. In the department’s class, I finished the block letters (though I still don’t think I’ve been credited for it – I have to find that darn link) and moved on to italics. And at this, I pretty much lost all hope.

As it turns out, Russian – a language that, one colleague told me, the more you study, the less you know --  in some cases,  has letters that look totally, totally different in italics than they do in block print. How do people learn this?

Up until now, I knew how to spell cat. It was C-A-T, and as the kindergarten song relayed, was basically the first word I could spell. (Hippopotamus was a lot harder.) And even now, I can understand that in Russian, there is no hard “c” and it’s represented with a “k.” I can grasp the concept that in other languages, words aren’t always direct cognates to English but are close. I’m OK with knowing that the English word “cat” is spelled “kot” in Russian. Not a problem there.

But oh my, these italics. The “v” sound, which is represented by “B” in Russian (I can grasp that mentally, too), somehow, in lower-case italics, looks sort of like an “e,” if the bottom stretch of the “e” made a loop like the top. I had trouble writing it in a pencil because I kept filling in the loops. That’s just weird. Why should something look vastly different in lower-case italics? The lower-case “g” looks like a very small, very awkward, backwards “2” or maybe “z.” The “d” sound in Russia is represented by a letter that looks kind of like pi, if pi had an additional line near the bottom, but the lower-cased italics letter looks a lot more like an English “d,” but it’s a bit lopsided. I can get used to those, even if it is confusing.

But man, the lower-case “OO” sound, which looks like a “Y” in regular block, turns to “u” in lower-case italics. Now that’s crazy. How did this come about, really? But the worst ones are “M”  and “T.” The lower-case italics “M” looks like a small upper-case “M”—points and all. And it’s important to remember that, even lower-case, it’s pointy because, for a reason I will never, ever understand, the lower-case italics “T” *also* looks like an “M” in lower case – with the rounded humps. It is totally crazy. No wonder Russians drink a lot of vodka.

It boggles my mind, and I have no idea how to grasp this. I could spell cat. It was really simple, a long time ago and for a very long time. Now, though, it’s spelled “k-o-t” as well as “k-a-m.”

I might never recover. Where is the vodka?