Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Hmm, Jeana's thinking of taking Russian! When I did it,…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Hmm, Jeana's thinking of taking Russian! When I did it, I chose Russian on rather a whim. (Japanese and Chinese were too popular; that was part of it.) And now I've been to Russia and I took five semesters (wow!) of Russian, and now when I read Crime and Punishment I wish I had the original text next to it so I could see what the translator is pulling on me.
Hey, in case you're going to Russia: the verb for "to eat" that the textbooks and teachers taught me here, yest', is tough to conjugate and I end up saying "he's going" instead of "he's eating" half the time. The verb that I heard the most in Russia, kushat', is easy to conjugate. And, since regular people say it all the time, it's more folkloric! Or something.
