Beverly Grove. 2 days before I return to Melbourne.
Here goes another short rant. It probably ties in with the previous one.
I think home is a problem. It’s complicated and painful. Broken relationships, money stress, constant tension humming in the background… the usual.
When I’m away, something changes. I feel lighter and calmer, and for a while, I stop thinking about family. The first feeling is relief, then comes guilt. I start asking myself whether wanting distance makes me selfish, whether craving escape means I’m failing at something I’m supposed to endure.
But,
Apparently I’m supposed to bleed quietly and call it maturity.
On a brighter note, I had my first Russian lesson with my sister today. She has never studied another language before, and watching a true beginner meet an entirely new sound system is equal parts delightful and mildly painful. Things that feel almost automatic to me take real effort for her, and seeing that contrast up close is strangely illuminating!
Meanwhile, I sat there nodding along, just knowledgeable enough to be annoying.
I already knew the Cyrillic alphabet and a bit of phonetics: stress patterns, vowel reduction, consonant devoicing. I came in armed with terminology, which is the linguistic equivalent of bringing a clipboard to a party. The only thing missing is my ability to roll my r’s, a skill my tongue has apparently decided is optional in this lifetime (I still have yet to get my lingual frenectomy).
I keep reassuring myself that it’s fine. In fast speech, the tap [ɾ] and trill [r] are basically allophones anyway. This is unlike Spanish, where they are two completely different phonemes. ahem, I’m looking at you, perro.
For the coming week, my main goal is vocabulary expansion. Grammar doesn’t really scare me. I’ve seen these concepts before in other languages. What does scare me is the idea of sitting down with a laminated chart of case endings and brute-forcing it into my brain.
Fortunately, the internet insists this is unnecessary. Apparently, if you expose yourself to enough Russian, your brain will simply absorb declensions by osmosis. I am cautiously optimistic. This may be propaganda from people who already survived the cases.
Still, it’s early days. New sounds, new letters, new grammatical systems, and two siblings at very different stages of linguistic confidence sitting in the same lesson. A promising setup for both progress and chaos.
We’ll see how next week goes.