WEEK 45 (6-12 NOV.)

November 5 to 7 is a holiday in Russia. Formerly it was an anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, now it's called The Day of Reconciliation and Accord.

Monday (6)
In the morning I studied French, then we cut wood with Mother for her oven and tried her new electric chainsaw in operation. We will continue with it tomorrow. Then we watched a documentary BBC film about the history of Norilsk (a part of the Gulag) which I recorded in Sweden.

Wednesday (8)
Yesterday and today my Mom and I continued to cut wood. Today we worked 4 hours cutting logs and pulling them with a rope to the shed and also laid them one after another other in the vegetable garden in order to make "terraces" later. Now this work is finished. In the evening we ate a cake and drank home-made wine.

I also studied French today, lessons 15 (drills) and 16 of my 30-lesson course. Now it's 7.30 p.m.

I listened to the US election results on the Radio Liberty and BBC at several times during the day. I'm personally for Gore, but both of them are better then our politicians.

This election is extraordinary because Gore and Bush are running so close. They said in the news that Gore congratulated Bush at first, but then phoned him again and withdrew his words. The election will depend on the results in Florida. Another interesting news, together with Hilary' victory, is the election of the Missouri State senator's widow; he himself died in the plane crash during the election campaign, but according to the law his name couldn't be removed from the ballot.

Thursday (9)
I went to Moscow leaving all money at home. I had only bus coupons with me. The controllers in the train to Moscow let me go when I showed my passport asked them to send the fine order to my home address. On the train from Moscow there were controllers again, I had to go in front of them to others cars as they were passing through the train. I couldn't buy lunch at the Institute, luckily I had a few apples with me.

On the way back from the Institute I got on a very crowded trolley-bus. At one of the bus-stops the door jammed my foot, rather painfully. I asked a guy in the crowd to punch my coupon; when I got it back I put it into the pocket without looking. On the last stop the controllers appeared, two men. I showed them the coupon, but it turned out it hadn't been punched. Probably the puncher was broken or it wasn't hit hard enough. The coupon costs just 3 roubles and the fine is 10. I had no money on me and offered to pay the fine with the coupons, but the men said they didn't need them, because they had the privilege on free riding on the city transport. They threatened to take me to the militia precinct after which the fine increases to 162 roubles, as they said. I had no desire to go there, 90% of Russian militia are just thugs. After some haggling we made a deal: I gave to them all the coupons I had (8) and they let me go. The loss was only $1, but I had a headache all the evening.

Also on Thursday we had a Psyhology lecture. I like these lectures: though we have to write everything down, the professor tells everything in a very concise, clear-cut manner. The lecture was about the laws of memory, how it works. He let us do an experiment: gave us a list on 20 words and after 4 min I could say the list by heart (he asked me), also backwards. The list was as follows (from memory, the words were in Russian):

television
cow
bicycle
sausage
spectacles
wire
apple
dog
curtain
automobile
sea
tree
clock
sun
book
coat
pen
crocodile
lamp
lock

In order to remember the words, he told us to make a story using them - the weirder, the better. The only requirement is that the words in the story must link one after another. In my mental story a TV set sits on the cow's horns, the cow is riding the bicycle, and so on till the 20th word. The story can stay in the memory very long, he said we'd remember it at least a week. It is possible to memorise numbers in that way too, but first one has to mentally assign a concrete word to all 10 digits.

Friday (10)
The last few days I felt a bit unwell. Still I continue with jogging in the morning, I missed only Friday. It got colder and started to snow. The first snow fell on Thursday, now it's 0.5 cm. deep.

On Friday I went to two lectures - the Teaching Methods and Testing (nothing special), then to the French Cultural Centre located at the Library of Foreign Literature (Taganskaya Metro). It's a very good centre, probably unique in Russia. It reminds me of libraries I frequented in Sweden. Thousands of French books, hundreds of CDs and videos, most of it can be borrowed home. I can't wait to be able to read unadapted French to use these materials. I sat and listened to French news on TV, understanding almost nothing, but still it was interesting; then used Internet for 1 hour - free (20 roubles/hour in other library halls).

Saturday (11)
Studied Lesson 16 (drills and written exercises) and Lesson 17 (texts). On Wednesday I'll go to the French class with the "strong group".

Sunday (12)
French: lesson 18 of Cours de Francais; then started "Uchimsia chitat'..." (see titles below). I need to acquire some French newspaper vocabulary quickly, that's why I chose this book.

In the evening I saw one of the films I have on my video cassettes, Demolition Man. It's the first film I've seen since I came back! I like this film. It's an action, but not boring, a comedy, but not stupid. It's a parody on politically correct society which has become totally reliant on computers. The characters use "futuristic" language, e.g. "be well!" (greeting), "enhance your calm!" (calm down), "violation of the verbal morality code" (cursing), etc.

WEEK 46 (13 - 19 NOV.)

Monday (13)
Visited two lectures: Country Study (on Islam) and Grammar (prefixes of the Verbs of Movement).

At the Country Study lecture we had a heated discussion about Chechnya, between me (independence to Chechnya and all regions who want it, leave Moscow Chechens in peace) and other students (get rid Chechenian mafia in Moscow, we've build so much in Chechnya, how can we give them that oil). The teacher was saying that we need to preserve the Russian borders, I said these borders were drawn by Lenin and Stalin, and by Russian tsars who occupied Caucasus by force.

I also went to the driving school, then studied French at home.

Tuesday (14)
Studied French at home.

Wednesday (15)
Was at the French classes at the Institute. We were training French sounds and the subjunctive. Later in the evening I did simulation driving exercises at the driving school.

Thursday (16)
Studied French at home again. Then at the driving school I drove the car for the first time - in the fist, second gears and the reverse. It wasn't difficult.

Friday (17)
Was at the Institute: 3 lectures. Next week we'll have "passive practicum"; we're going to attend 10 classes of Russian to foreign learners in different groups, write down our comments and then make a five-minutes' speech. Then I went to the library again. This time went to the French Centre and also visited the British Council Library. I didn't like it so much as the French centre, the fees are much higher and there are no non-fiction books (just language teaching books that can be borrowed only by teachers of English). I actually do not need to borrow English videos/books so much, I have lots of them at home. Next time I'll go to the American Center (in the same library, its services were free when I used it 2 years ago).

Weekend (18-19)
Weather was warm and muddy this week. Usually at this time we have snow and subzero temperatures.

At the weekend I stayed at home and read my textbooks of French and Russian. I also made a major cleaning of the flat.

On Sunday evening I watched a film on video La Belle Captive (in French). It's a part of the set I bought 2 years ago, it also includes a teaching cassette (key extracts from the film slowly repeated) and a booklet with the full text.

I started with seeing the film. It's a mystical film about a man who meets a nice woman in a bar and then finds her wounded - lying on the road apparently hit by a car. He tries to find a doctor for her, but instead becomes trapped with her in a strange house. They are locked by a group of men in black suits; the woman is probably their accomplice. Then the man is having sex with the woman, but she bits him - she is a vampire. There is another woman in the film, the man's boss, she's sent him on some mysterious mission. Afterwards the man sleeps with her as well. Later in the film the man is haunted by the woman from the bar, and at the end his woman boss commands his shooting by a fire squad (seemingly same black-suited men). I felt sorry for the poor guy.

I liked the mood and the suspense of the film and I could understand the language a bit too. Now I'll study the text and the teaching cassette.

WEEK 47 (20 - 26 NOV.)

Monday (20)
Our practicum started. I attended two lessons - Phonetics (for Chinese students) and Grammar (students mostly from S. Korea) making notes of what I liked and what I didn't.

Then I went to a driving class. I practised two exercises:
1) start the car and accelerate to 2d gear, go 100 meters and stop neatly at the border, this should be done in 14 sec.;
2) put the car into a limited area ("garage").
The exercises were rather difficult, especially the second, still a few of my attempts were successful. Next driving class is in a week.

Tuesday (21)
Two more classes: Speech Practice (same Chinese group) and a class of beginners (Indians and one Tunisian; they are going to study medicine in Russian).

Then I read newspapers at the Institute's library, bought food and went home. In the evening I studied French. Today I completed the book Learn to Read French in 30 Days; I'll just revise its vocabulary.

Wednesday (22)
Practicum classes: Grammar, Vocabulary. At home I read the book accompanying the French film La Belle Captive; it didn't take long because the book has a parallel translation, however there are a lot of printing mistakes in it.

Thursday (23)
Practice classes:
1) Business Russian - the students (mostly from Romania, very conscientious) read aloud dialogues pertaining to business communication, then answered to questions about the TV interview of a Russian politician (Schokhin) which they'd seen; the lesson was well structured and quite effective: I only noticed a few words that the teacher pronounced with a wrong stress.

2) Analysis of the Literary Text - based on the story Labyrinth by Petrushevskaya (our leading contemporary writer); the students were from different countries, advanced level. It was quite interesting to listen how the teacher explained the inner meaning of words, why these words were chosen by the author (e.g. siyat' and not blistet' or sverkat'), the effect they create. I think, however, that a few words were coined by Petrushevskaya herself, in any case I'd never heard them before (vorokhnutsa, kulyama), I think it was not justified to draw much attention to them.

Then one of the teachers of Russian stayed with us for an hour telling us about her work in China. She confided to us things that I never heard before.

First, she said, many Chinese are deceitful. From childhood they are taught to lie in order to achieve their goals. She said that she'd got a job offer for 2 years from a private Chinese company who signed a contract with her and the Institute. They promised a good salary and a flat with furniture. The reality was much less glamorous. For a few months she got no salary at all. (The employer said "I'm the boss and this month I don't want to pay".) It was useless to show the contract. The company also printed Russian textbooks without paying royalties. Only because she later found a job with the Russian faculty at a Chinese university, the teacher could stay afloat, get a decent salary and a flat. She said many other teachers at Pushkin Institute had similar experiences from working for Chinese companies.

She mentioned other details:
- Food: in Chinese shops there's no butter, sunflower oil, cheese, margarine, no onions in winter and carrots in summer, only "chemical" milk; but pork is excellent; table manners are appalling; if you're going to eat out first look at the waiter's nails.
- Teaching Russian: the country is much oriented towards America, English is very popular. However, Russian is still in demand. Russian teachers should buy as many textbooks as possible in Russia, in China they'll find textbooks with Stalin's speeches.
- Clothes: they do their laundry mixing all sorts of clothes in a ball and washing it in cold water; in winter men wear 5 layers of underwear (of different colours) that they roll up on their legs to ventilate when sitting indoors.
- Health: take all possible medicines from Russia; in China standards of cleanliness are much lower; there's no sewage in Chines houses; people come to work even with typhoid.
- Contacts: the Russian Consulate and Russian-speaking people in China are very instrumental in providing contacts with employers, etc.
- People: deceit (above), at a vegetable market all vendors keep high prices for foreigners, so you have to pay up and they brag and laugh about it. Still, you can make many good honest friends there; also the Chinese are very hospitable.

In spite of all the difficulties, our teacher didn't regret going to China. "It is a very interesting country", she said.

These are our teacher's experiences. I think that the Chinese are different. Those I worked with in Sweden were well-educated and had excellent table manners.

Friday (24)
Practicum classes:
1) Grammar (aspect of the verb). That was an excellent class, everything went without a hitch. The teacher's explanations were concise and clear. The students (all Vietnamese girls) were well-prepared and active. Two good ideas I picked up the student keep diaries in Russian and let the teacher (only her) read and correct them. They write a lot, many pages in Russian! Also after reading a short text (a description of the countryside) the girls were asked to draw a picture of it in their notebooks and write down the verbs. At home they will be re-telling the story using their drawings.

2) Speech Development. The students were an advanced group of Chinese; they were would-be translators for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The objective of the course was to train their speech skills so that that can speak about anything (their teacher said she wanted to make demagogues of them). The students were asked to make speaches agreeing and then disagreeing with the statements they had got (quotations from Russian writers, also the Russian proverb Ne rodis' krasivoj, a rodis' schastlivoj (Don't be born beautiful, be born happy). The students also got a list of Russian phrases for expressing agreement, disagreement, doubt, etc. I think the class wasn't very successful, the students said it was difficult for them to speak e.g. in favour of something, if in reality they thought the opposite. I think this type of work is very useful, it's popular e.g. in the US, but the statements for debating should be chosen better. Only statements that easily lend themselves for opposite arguments should be selected.

Weekend (25 - 26)
Reading on HTML. Insulated windows from cold and put up curtains in the flat.

Weather got colder this week. The temperature dropped from +5 to -10 in two days. So it seems very cold. There is snow also, now it will stay.

WEEK 48 (27 NOV. - 3 DEC.)

Monday (27)
Institute: a lecture on Culture (Culturology), then Russian grammar. The lecture on Culture was quite interesting, general concepts of culture, attitude towards culture in the Russian/Soviet society. The lecture on Grammar was as always: the teacher kept dwelling on less important points of the Russian Grammar saying "this is very difficult, this is only for you, not for your students". Actually, I'm only interested in what my future students will need. To improve my native Russian I'll need quite another course.

Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language. The institute is located in the south part of Moscow (Academika Volgina, 6) and surrounded by grey boxes of research institutes. The multi-story building on the left is the hostel.

Tuesday (28)
Library day: French Cultural Centre and American Information Centre (both at the library of Foreign Literature).

Wednesday, Thursday (29, 30)
Reading at home. Driving school on Thursday.

Fiction:
● Pushkin A.S. (Prose; p. 179 - 540 in) Compiled Works in 3 vols. V. 3 - Moscow: Gos. Izdatelstvo Khud. Literatury, 1954. (in Russian)