ни о чём (about nothing)

Mom, I only brought one English language book: A Treasury of American Scandals: those who let freedom swing, and the Bible, but I don't really count it since I don't particularly plan to devote much time to reading it. I have since borrowed from Andrew (a linguistics professor at Harvard) the book Reference Time and Aspect, which is fascinating but a bit dense, as I haven't yet taken a class on semantics (I think that is the field of study it falls into...not really sure)--anyway, it's a linguistic analysis of the Russian verb system, with a comparison to the English verbal system.

I did have with me 3 magazines, but I am sorry to report they didn't make it past Petersburg. My Economist lasted several days, and I purchased the new one in the DC airport, but my Vanity Fair and Newsweek didn't survive the 8-hour flight across the Atlantic. Anyway, I threw them all away in Petersburg to lighten the load, and the last Economist hit the trash in Volgograd. I haven't had much to read since. (Not that I have time to, anyway). Though it is a nice change of pace for my poor abused brain, being able to easily understand anything.

(BTW...I now love the Economist. I highly recommend it for all fields of interest.)

About the Russian-only language pledge...
Yeah, I have to say that in general, when talking to one another, there is a general conspiracy to ignore it as much as possible. Whenever Tim, our group leader, is around, we fall back to Russian (he's lectured us on the topic once already), but there are many things we want to say to one another that we just can't construct in Russian. I am trying to be better about saying the things I already know how to say in Russian to the other American students, and constantly trying to figure out how to say and memorize important phrases. There is an entire group (we are split into 3 classes) that seem to speak almost no Russian. C'est la vie.

I finally bought a Russian-Russian dictionary. I love it. I bought it in St. Petersburg because it was cheap (and literally the lightest--but has 53,000 words), but I really enjoy looking up words in it. Plus, it provides the grammatical information that I can never remember (the genitive plural of 'village'...anyone? anyone?). I don't think I will ever forget that the first entry I glanced at and understood was кладбище (cemetery). Speaking of which, there is a HUGE cemetery in the middle of Astrakhan' that I pass on my way to and from school every day. I sooo want to take a picture of it to show y'all, but I am afraid I'll be considered rude or crazy if I pull out my camera in the middle of the marshrutka ride.

My classes:
I have 4. Plus the previously-mentioned lecture. (I can only fully intone my disgust with the Russian word: лекция.) Phonetics (fun but not frequent enough for my desperate need), grammar (not quite moving fast enough, although today the teacher added reflexives to already-despised prefixed motion verbs and blew my mind), writing (not doing ANYTHING useful), and reading (the texts are a little boring, but otherwise an okay class). We have tons of homework (I'm in the third group--the Camomiles--the Russians' idea) , and we are breezing through grammar. I've done 45 pages of exercises in the past week and a half.

Social life later. Computer time is up now.

--shelley