I'm really not good at updating.

As usual, I spent most of Christmas worrying about the things I had to do for the next term. Difficult books to read and all that, whereas all I wanted to read was fiction. And I did read some books, The Thornbirds and Wild Seed, both of which I recommend. For those of you who don't already know what the first one is about, suffice it to know that it's an old-fashioned epic drama of the kind that can't go wrong. The second is a somewhat more curious book, about immortality and what it does to morality. I have read some other books as well, but nothing worth commenting on just yet. If I don't get overwhelmed with university in the next couple of days I will try to write a bit about some other books as well.

Good stuff.

My classes haven't actually started, but since I have a very good supervisor for my master's thesis, I'm actually starting to work on it now and not in the fall, when I'm supposed to start. I'm planning to go spend the fall in the Ukraine with a friend of mine, so naturally it would be a good idea to get the work started already at this early stage. This means I'm reading far heavier books than those previously mentioned, like Christopher Lyon's Definiteness and Michael Flier's Aspects of Nominal Determination in Old Church Slavic. Naturally, it's quite frightening. I haven't written anything beyond 25 pages so far during my time as a student, and now I am going to write my master's thesis on long form and short form adjectives and participles in Old Church Slavonic. I'm also annotating a new saint vitae from Codex Suprasliensis for the corpus that I get my data from, Житие и страдание святого мученика Конона Исаврийского.

That's in addition to my classes, which are Variants of Russian, Russian written culture - origins and history up until the 18th century, and a double class on ancient Greek! I hope all of this won't be too overwhelming. I have a goal of reading 35 books this year and on keeping up learning Ukrainian very slowly. Writing this out I feel the need for a second glass of wine, and perhaps a whiskey (cheap, of course, I am but a student).

Today I got myself a second desk! I'm very thrilled about it, because ever since I got my first desk (and I was very happy about having a desk at last after having lived in tiny apartments in Oslo), the entire surface has always been covered by my huge keyboard, my ergonomic mouse, my laptop and my extra monitor. So I end up studying on the sofa. And falling asleep. In our new apartment, my office is so big I can have two desks, a cupboard, a bookshelf and still fit in a guest bed when someone comes to visit (something that never happens, but it may). Fabulous, isn't it? The best part is that I can avoid the awful assigned seats at University for master students, that you have to apply for and go to four times a week if you don't want to lose them. You find them in small rooms with bad ventilation and you sit at half a meter's distance from the next person. And you can't eat, drink, play music and all that. How can people study in that kind of environment?

Much better.

2011 - The year people started taking me serious?

I kind of stopped posting simply because I ran out of time. Just as I predicted, keeping up with the one book per week thing is proving increasingly challenging, but I haven't failed yet. My biggest issue is that I want to read in Russian, and that slows me down considerably. Starting Любовь Фрау Клейст is strategically more or less retarded, but I do need to read some more Russian now.


I was speaking to a friend the other day, and he mentioned going completely off a language after having spent some time in the country speaking it. I wonder if that's what happened to me with Russian. Before going to Russia, I read all the time. I've hardly read anything since coming back. That's about to change now though! And I could perhaps just skim through a small Russian book and perhaps make it in a week, but now I'm reading because I want to increase my vocabulary. The translation class at university does not offer me any new vocabulary, and I want to push further ahead into the region of "wtf you know that word!?"-vocabulary.


And as for Russian, I was also at a mini Russian movie night the other day with three friends. We drank the Hungarian national alcohol Unicum (and I was not the one who brought it!!), ate Norwegian carrot cake and watched the brilliant and absolutely absurd movie Город Зеро.


If you see it somewhere, buy it.

I kind of feel like I'm filling up my quota of things Russian. I just have to increase my expertise in some other areas as well, notably in linguistics... Ьy linguistics vocabulary is sorely lacking, and I think it would be a wise investment on my behalf to perhaps dedicate this summer to linguistics self-study. Getting a Master's degree in Russian language isn't the most lucrative thing to do, and our student advisor (a very helpful Russian lady) always mentions how the alternative of our program (career wise) is really a better idea: Russian area studies. There are actually some jobs attached to that one, and you can't do a thing just knowing Russian - there are plenty of Russians in Norway who do that. Getting a Master's in Russian language is, in my opinion, rather pointless unless you do it brilliantly. My dream is to continue working at university, to get a Ph.D. and then just go from there. So I was very pleased when our student advisor told me this was what I was supposed to do based on my grades, without me mentioning my plans to her.

If you plan on going deep into language, you have to know your linguistics. And I'm quite curious to see how this may accelerate my language learning. I already see how being very familiar with some changes in Indo-European languages can be greatly helpful in acquiring vocabulary. The same words really are everywhere, they are just hard to spot unless you can track their development. Naturally, this particular bit doesn't help me at all with Hungarian :-) And I am actually back on track with that one, speaking it twice a week and everything with my new language partner from Hungary. If things go according to plan this weekend, I will even be opening up Üvöltő szelek. For the third time, in a third language.

But as usual I have lots of plans, lots of great ideas. I also have lots of work. Not only did I have to take an extra class outside of my full-time studies this term, but I also got a job as a translator. The job wasn't supposed to take all that long, but I think they greatly underestimated how much text there actually is. Yesterday, I got registered as an interpreter for an interpreting business in Oslo as well. So it does actually look like I'm finally getting a bit of experience to make up for my lacking formal translation/interpreting qualifications.

Well, I have an essay on linguistic agreement to write since we go to Kiel in Germany on Monday. But before I leave, I wanted to share two links for the truly nerdy.

http://www.ruscorpora.ru/ - The National Corpus of the Russian Language - perfect when you're searching for occurrences of words, grammatical features, exceptions, anything.

Vasmer's etymological dictionary of the Russian language - find out where all the words come from! Our Slavic language history teacher teacher told us this was a book (actually, four books) any serious student of Russian should have. But hey, it's online!

Universities...

While I procrastinate some more and avoid translating next week's text for my Russian translation class (I'll do that tomorrow anyway) and also avoid lying down on the couch to continue reading Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (not because it isn't interesting, it's very interesting, but I am afraid of falling asleep at this time of the day) I thought I'd write a little bit more about studying languages at university.

Visit any language forum and people will be telling you that there's no point in wasting your time at university; you can learn a language much faster by yourself. And I completely agree. For those lucky few who have some self-discipline and some motivation, languages are best learned outside the dusty walls of academia. For those lacking self-discipline, a university may be helpful, but if you also lack motivation, I think we can safely say that you will never be fluent anyway. This is not always the issue though. If you somehow want to use your language professionally, you are most likely going to need a degree of some sort in order to "prove" that you actually know the language in question. This makes things even more funny since anyone who has studied a language at university should know that, for example, a bachelor's degree in Russian doesn't mean crap. Especially if you study at the University of Oslo. I can very safely say that no one without prior knowledge of Russian can show up at the university one day and graduate three years later with 80 Norwegian credits in Russian - and claim to be fluent. Certainly they will have knowledge of Russian, but at the present time I even doubt you could say those people would be able to read a book in Russian. Now, here it is very important to note that you don't spend all those three years studying Russian. Actual Russian studies only make up half that time. And who, besides some remarkable exceptions, ever learned Russian to fluency in 1 1/2 year?

Now, we don't have to demand fluency from these kind of studies. Perhaps we can hope that something resembling fluency will show up after a Masters degree, but after a Bachelor's degree you would think students would be able to at least feel a bit comfortable using the language. Right? There's no point in comparing these kind of language studies with those that are preceded by high school language classes (usually French, Spanish, Italian, German), since a person with the same amount of credits in any of those languages should actually be able to call himself or herself rather fluent. But those are easy languages, and students usually have more experience with them, no matter how useless high school language learning is. The question is then - how do you get comfortable with a language you never use?

In between beers the other night at a student pub, a fellow student of Russian said that the grammar class we are now taking is actually mostly a class that enables us to study more. More than anything else, it's a preparation for Master studies. Is that what language studies at university should be all about? Study in order to study more? Personally, I'm not against it since my interest in Russian is rather academic and I am going to pursue my studies at higher and higher levels, but I don't think the solution is optimal for the majority of students. Several students in our group (the same group that went to St. Petersburg, so we all know each other) have pointed out that the Russian classes this semester are more or less suited for me and another student in the group, who is very interested in grammar. That's 2 out of 15. The students who want to learn to speak Russian are not thrilled (one friend simply changed major to area studies instead). Certainly, all sorts of grammar study is somehow useful, and this semester we are going to write academic papers on smaller grammatical features of the Russian language. I get the feeling we mostly do this in order to learn to write about grammar; how to use the correct methodology and the correct tools. For academics it's brilliant, but how practical is it? When you go to a university to study a language, you do expect to learn that language. The "dry" grammar nerdery is balanced with a heavy dose of translation exercises, and that, combined with the fact that our translation teacher is actually Russian and speaks Russian to us helps a lot - especially since we have no oral part. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the other Russian class of the semester is a class on Slavic language history. Perhaps I should repeat, just for emphasis, that the University of Oslo offers no actual Russian speaking classes. Ever. (I think). You get one in St Petersburg, but that's it, 3 months.

Let's compare the 2nd semester Russian classes of some universities (without preparation classes, so 3rd semester at Uni of Oslo). One semester is 30p.
Uni. of Oslo (St Petersburg semester) - Theoretical Russian grammar - 10p, Russian translation & Spoken Russian - 10p, Practical Russian Grammar - 10p (or Russian politics 10p)
Uni. of Oslo (in Oslo) - Russian grammar II - 10p, Russian translation and language use - 10p
Uni. of Umeå - Russian grammar 8p, Russian text 8p, Oral and written Russian 6p, Russian literature 6p, Russian society 4p
Uni. of Stockholm - Syntax and written Russian (incl. translation) 6p, Oral Russian 3p, Russian history of literature and literature 3p (this includes reading 5 books in Swedish and extracts in Russian), "Lecture" - on research and debate on the subject (doesn't count in points), Fiction and Non-Fiction and individual task, including translation and oral presentation 8p

Somehow I feel that Oslo's version is not really optimal (Stockholm's and Umeå's kind of make me want to change country again though). Shouldn't there be some sort of option for those who want to develop more practical skills, versus those who plan on staying at university and who need to be more... academically competent? You can speak perfectly fine Russian without being able to write dissertations on aspect and without being able to write three pages on the formation of the imperative. Conversely, you can be able to write those fancy papers without actually being able to hold a normal conversation in Russian. The idea is most likely that you are supposed to acquire those practical skills after you have perfected the theoretical part, but that forces people to stay ages at university. You could perhaps think that the solution is to go to Russia. But nah. You only get to go to Russia at the Master's level if you study Russian area studies, not if you study language. And you have to pay some serious tuition fees.

Well, that being said, I am applying for the Masters program in the fall, and I think this spring's classes will be the most interesting ever, but then I am not really the average Russian student either. Now I have some books to read, some (absolutely perfect) biscotti to put in jars and an apartment to clean, before I go to this semester's first class on Russian literature.

And it goes on.

It's time for a new semester at the University, and I think it is going to be a very interesting one. I have kind of agreed to try to read 52 books in 52 weeks this year, and so far I'm doing good since I have read two books, and I guess everything would have been good for the coming semester if I had only stuck to the plan of my program.

Now, in my opinion, this is probably the most interesting semester so far when it comes to Russian. Just have a look at these classes:

1. Introduction to Slavic and Russian language history
*DROOL* I know!
Reading material: a stapled book by the same name and a stapled book called "older Slavic texts", both written by the professor holding the class. In addition to this, some reading material and so on will be handed out during lectures. The University of Oslo presents a lot of its reading material in the form of stapled booklets (sometimes very big, but these two booklets are surprisingly slim), since this is cheaper than printing real books (you simply pay 1,34NOK or something like that per page). You end up with lots of ugly "books", but it's cheaper in a country where everything is extremely expensive anyway. So we can safely say that this course has not ruined me!

2. Russian grammar and translation III
Not all that exciting, I know... But this year, we actually hand in our translations and get them corrected! For me, this is sensational! Sure, we did that in Russia, but there we paid for our classes.
The reading material for this class is a horribly expensive (€96) grammar book that we bought last year and another slim booklet entitled "Russian syntax, the complex sentence". This class includes writing what corresponds to a bachelor essay on grammar.

3. Russian literature I
Everyone tells me this class is ridiculously easy and that the professor really does not want to be there. It's very basic since you can actually take it without having studied more than one semester of Russian, and you do the reading in Russian, so you go figure how much reading we will have to do... And of course, since we're talking of (mostly classic) Russian literature, anyone with any sort of connection to Russian things know that you don't go out and buy those texts. Actually, the University even provides us with links to the online texts. We're reading Pelevin as well! No books of course, just a short story.

So you see, my academic semester would have been extremely cheap and rather relaxed. That is, if I had stopped there. Since I am working towards double bachelors, I need more classes, so first I added this one:

4. Democracy, Human Rights, and Gender – Global Perspectives in Education
This is a distance class in English, and sure as hell the reading list includes like 10 books. The University of Umeå is excellent at including tons of books in small classes, but at least those books tend to be normally priced ones, as opposed to the horribly expensive ones the University of Oslo always use. Still, in my current economic situation I can't buy all those books and for the first time ever I have actually gone and borrowed them at the Library. The ones that I could find at least. I don't like doing this since I always underline and take notes in my books, but meh, what can you do. This class seems to demand a lot of work, and to be honest I'm a bit scared of it. The books do seem interesting though, and I'm going to read the first one over the weekend, Robert Dahl's "On Democracy".

Obviously that's not all. Yesterday a (fellow language enthusiast) friend came to visit to have a look at our new apartment and our new cat, and he told me that the University of Oslo offers an Icelandic introduction class this spring, so of course I'm signing up for that one with him!

I'm not signed up yet, and perhaps there will be some sort of problem with me taking the class, but I'm at least going to try to sign up for.

5. Icelandic I, introduction to modern Icelandic
Books - probably of the expensive kind :(

I am probably underestimating it, thinking it will be a breeze, but it doesn't really matter since I can always drop out of it if I have too little time. I won't be cut off from any student funding (which is already so tiny that it hardly matters) anyway since I am way beyond a full-time student. A couple of summers ago I had a fling with Icelandic for two or three months, but then I stopped, and it will be fun picking it up again. Speaking of languages I have to pick up, Hungarian and German can be found in death throes on the floor...

Back?

The reasons for the neglect of this blog can be seen below:



Since I became an ordinary university student, I have had precious little amounts of free time to dedicate to my language studies. The speed-reading project is sadly on hold since I simply do not have that much time to spare each day. If I were a less serious student, I could pull it off, but right now I am in the process of writing some essays and even though these essays are in no way important, I want to use the opportunity to learn as much as I can about my field of study. That is to say, Russia.

Since I am mostly into Russian related things these days, I thought I'd share parts of a poem with you. I had some trouble understanding parts of it, but I got some help over at the HTLAL forums. The poem was written by Alexander Blok in 1918 and it fits in rather nicely with the Eurasianist movement of the 1920s in Russia. The Eurasianists considered Russia to be a part of Asia and embraced the Asian heritage that had for so long been neglected or denied. They had in common with the Bolsheviks that they believe that the West was on its way down and Russia would take the lead and show the world how it's done.

A general idea at the time, first voiced by among others Nikolai Danilevskii and Konstantin Leontev, was that Russia had saved Europe over and over whereas Europe never showed any gratitude. Europe wouldn't even recognize Russia as a European country. Russia must therefore stop protecting Europe and instead join the East in an alliance against the West.

Идите все, идите на Урал!
Мы очищаем место бою
Стальных машин, где дышит интеграл,
С монгольской дикою ордою!

Но сами мы - отныне вам не щит,
Отныне в бой не вступим сами,
Мы поглядим, как смертный бой кипит,
Своими узкими глазами.

Не сдвинемся, когда свирепый гунн
В карманах трупов будет шарить,
Жечь города, и в церковь гнать табун,
И мясо белых братьев жарить!...

В последний раз - опомнись, старый мир!
На братский пир труда и мира,
В последний раз на светлый братский пир
Сзывает варварская лира!


Here's the entire poem, read in the movie У озера.