Podcasts for Language Learning

I wrote about using podcasts to improve my Russian in a previous post, but I've been having so much fun with them that thought the subject warranted a blog post all its own.

According to Dr. Chaput, one of my Russian professors at Harvard, the best way to improve your speaking fluency is to listen to native speech that you can actually understand. This makes sense when you consider that this is how children learn to speak. In order to achieve this, Dr. Chaput recommended that we watch Poor Nastya (Бедная Настя), a Russian soap opera about the lifestyles of the rich and royal—future Tsar Alexander II, to be precise. Although the show has a historical theme, it’s not exactly the most historically accurate depiction of the Romanov family. Apparently the members of the Russian court were extremely tan. Hmm...

Anyways, I find that I don’t usually have much time to sit down and watch Russian soap operas, so listening to Russian podcasts works better for me. I’m already a big podcast fan (current favorite is NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour), so this fits nicely into my life. I can listen to them when I’m driving or walking, so they keep me pleasantly distracted without requiring a big time commitment. I found that by searching the iTunes podcast directory in Russian, I could find dozens of podcasts. There are tons of podcasts in other languages as well—all you have to do is click on "Podcasts" under LIBRARY on the column on the left of your iTunes window and then click on the Podcast Directory arrow on the lower right.

Right now, I’m regularly listening to the broadcasts of Эхо Москвы (Echo of Moscow), which the home of intelligent talk radio in Russia. They have guests from all over the political spectrum, including liberals, pro-Putinists, and Russian nationalists. (Strangely enough, they are owned by Gazprom. The plot thickens...) The best sources of their programming that I have found are Особое мнение (Personal Opinion) and their Улучшенный фид (The Best Feed), which are both available for free through iTunes.

I should add that I don’t get too stressed about understanding everything in the podcasts. If there’s something particularly interesting that I’ve missed, I’ll go back and listen to it, but otherwise my goal is to follow along without worrying that I caught every word.

I’m a big believer that language learning should be entertaining, so I’ve also found a few movie review podcasts for when I get tired of hearing about the travails of Pussy Riot (which is often). The Russian podcast world is still a bit limited, but there is a fair amount of material out there on iTunes and PodFM.ru.

My latest experiment is listening to a French podcast. Considering that I spent 7 years learning French, I was disappointed that it has atrophied so much. I never seem to have any reason to use French, but it seems like it could come in handy one day.

I found basically the perfect podcast for me, La musique fait l’histoire (Music Makes History). I just listened to my first episode, “Les années disco, les années homo.” As you can probably guess from the untranslated title, it was pretty entertaining! It was a bit weird to realize how much better my listening skills are in Russian now compared to French. No matter how long I study it, sometimes French just sounds like the grown-up voices on Peanuts to me. Happily, the second time I listened to the episode—while killing time in the cell phone lot at Sky Harbor airport—I was much more successful. Once you get used to hearing French again, it just starts to sound like weirdly pronounced English with some different words thrown in. 

What I like about listening to podcasts is that they entertain you enough so that you hardly realize you are learning. So, in addition to improving my French, I also got to hear about about the gay subtext of disco songs from the ‘70s. Spoiler alert: This includes every Village People song! Shocking! There was also the additional amusement of hearing a French professor pronounce the word “funky.”

So, for me podcasts are a free, low-effort form of language maintenance. While zipping around on Valley freeways, I have turned my mom’s hybrid Camry into a big, white, fuel-efficient, language-learning machine!

Waiting

When I find out I’m going to have to go to a government office in the former Soviet Union, I reflexively cringe. I’ve had enough experience with bureaucratic jerks that I know the experience is not going to be a pleasant one. Nevertheless, when I was offered the chance to interview the head of the Education Administration in Gagauzia for my research project, I knew I had to seize it.

My host father Grigory called an acquaintance of his in the Gagauz government and secured a meeting for me at 11:00 on a Monday. After a bit of confusion as to where the Education Administration was located, my host mother Zina dropped me off at city hall at 10:50, letting the secretary know that I had an appointment at 11:00. I took a seat in the antechamber near the secretary’s desk.

City Hall in Comrat

And the waiting began.

As the minutes ticked by on the clock, I got increasingly annoyed. At 11:10 I wasn’t too worried, but by 11:30 I realized that the head of the Education Administration wasn’t even in her office. When people came by to ask where she might be, the secretary just shrugged. She didn’t seem to be aware of my appointment. Another woman was waiting next to me. We spent an hour watching the secretary go about her job, which seemed to involve sorting papers in various file folders and telling the people who dropped by that her boss wasn’t in.

By 12:00, I was starting to get seriously irritated. I had an appointment for 11:00 had waited for an hour, and nobody seemed to think it was appropriate to let me know when the head of the Education Administration was going to be able to see me. I had nothing to do, so I kept going over the questions I had written and re-reading my notes from previous interviews in my notebook.

When I finally piped up with a question about when the head of the Education Administration might be back, the secretary realized from my accent that I was a foreigner. The secretary turned out to be a very pleasant person who was from the same hometown as one of my friends. We chatted for twenty minutes or so, with the woman next to me occasionally chiming in. I started to realize that my situation wasn’t so bad compared to hers. She had been waiting since 8:00 for the head of the Education Administration to see her and deal with her issue. Her problem seemed to be a simple personnel issue, something to do with getting the vacation time she deserved. I wondered why this issue couldn’t be dealt with at a lower level of the bureaucracy, but the woman seemed to have exhausted all her options and decided it was time to go to the top. She was from a village and she had come to town specifically to see the head of the Education Administration and get her issue resolved, even if she had to wait the whole day.

Talking with the secretary relieved some of my anxiety, since I stopped feeling like I was being personally snubbed. While we were talking, the head of Education Administration came in, evaluated the situation in the waiting room, announced that she wasn’t receiving anyone today, but said that she would see us anyways. She then disappeared behind a closed office door. After fifteen minutes, she invited in the woman next to me. After about a half an hour, I got invited in. 

After the annoyance of waiting for an hour and a half, my Russian wasn’t exactly in tip-top condition and I had some difficulty concisely explaining what I wanted. She asked why I had been sitting in the waiting room so “modestly” and I wasn’t sure how to respond. Was I supposed to bang down the door and come marching in? At any rate, she seemed eager to get rid of me, gave me some material to read, and told me to come back before 10:00 on Thursday if I had any questions. This lasted all of ten minutes.

I spent the next three days reading the material, which turned out to be extremely useful for my research. I arrived at 9:20 on Thursday armed with more precise questions, hoping that I might be seen earlier this time.

Two hours later, I made it into the office of the deputy head of education. I wished they had decided to foist me upon the deputy earlier, because the interview was worth the wait. This very efficient woman answered all my questions very precisely in the space of half an hour and even helped me arrange an interview that afternoon with the director of the vocational school in Comrat. (He ended up being extremely hospitable and we chatted for an hour about his vocational school while he plied me with tea and cookies!) When I left the deputy head’s office with my interview notes in hand, I passed by more people sitting in the waiting room.

I wasn’t sure whether to be outraged by the whole affair or to accept it all with an air of resignation. On the one hand, I understand that people who work in the government in Gagauzia are busy. But so are people who work in the government in the U.S., and I can’t imagine that I would be kept waiting for hours if I had an appointment with the superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, which, for the record, is responsible for the education of at least twice as many students. If they couldn’t see you in a reasonable time frame, they’d tell you to come back another time. At the end of the day, I consoled myself with the fact that I got the information I needed, even if it took over 3 hours of waiting.

Apparently my situation wasn’t at all unique. My Russian tutor said that you should expect to wait at least an hour in any government office, regardless of whether you have an appointment. My colleague from the university said she once waited an entire nine-to-five day in a government office just for one signature.

While I appreciate that different cultures have different conceptions of time, what I find the most appalling about this situation is the attitude that it reflects towards citizens. Their time is valuable. Your time is cheap. 

I’m not sure what could be done to fix this situation. It seems like a pipe dream to expect people to make a schedule and stick to it. Some of the problems (like the woman who waited hours to talk to someone about her vacation time) just seem like a pure failure to delegate. I don’t expect the government office culture of Moldova to change anytime soon, but it would be nice for secretaries to at least apologize to those people who have spent hours in the waiting room.

You Know You’ve Just Come Back From Moldova When...

• You find yourself rooting for Russia in the Olympics, although you’re not quite sure why.

• The fact that Americans rarely experience power/water outages continues to amaze you. While you fully appreciate the fact that your town has a modern plumbing system, you keep throwing the toilet paper in the trash instead of the bowl out of habit.

• The microwave seems to be a dubious and perhaps even dangerous appliance.

• Having cereal for breakfast just seems strange. Why have cereal for breakfast when you can have noodles covered in sour cream? (Uh...on second thought, bring on the Cheerios!)

• You’re just so excited to drink beer that actually tastes good. 

• Your body misses walking everywhere, but you realize that you would probably die of heatstroke if you tried to walk to the grocery store.

• It seems like everyone is just eating way too much meat. Where are the vegetables, people? Why aren’t there tomatoes and cucumbers on every table? Is no one aware that it is summer?

• You find yourself worrying about how the Sikh temple shooting will affect America’s reputation abroad. 

• You reflexively check peaches for worms until you remember that American farmers use pesticides. You aren’t sure whether you prefer bugs or pesticides in your peaches.

• It occurs to you that the local news may actually be more inane than state-controlled Russian media. You thank God for NPR, but a small part of you misses listening to GRT (Gagauz Television and Radio).

• You have never fully appreciated how amazing A/C is until now.

• You are dismayed at the fashion victims you see while doing errands. 

• Speaking your native language at stores and restaurants is refreshing. No need to linguistically gear up and put your game face on before every interaction with people in the service profession.

• You feel something is vaguely wrong and then realize you haven’t drunk tea in several days. 

Lviv

As I sit here watching men’s gymnastics in Moldovan and recovering from my 18 hour bus ride from Lviv, a thought occurred to me: Ukraine is great!

Every time I visit a new Ukrainian city, I am impressed. First, I thought Odessa was the best city in Ukraine (sorry, Kiev). Then Sevastopol replaced it. Now Lviv is a serious contender for the much-sought-after title of Erin’s Favorite Ukrainian City.

What makes Lviv so great? It is a breath of fresh air.

Now, I’m not against Soviet architecture. I feel that it is often unfairly maligned. Look at this example of Soviet architecture:

Republic Square, Yerevan, Armenia

Or how about this one:

Moscow State University

Not as ugly as the stereotypes, right?

Nevertheless, the Soviet architecture can get a little old. I’m not sure who thought it was a good idea to put the Moldovan ballet in this boxy building, but I would like to slap them in the face. This is what a real theater should look like!

Lviv Opera and Ballet Theater

Lviv’s historic city center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is pure Central European bliss. Beautiful façades, bright colors, picturesque cafes. Lviv’s residents know how to live! 

Lviv was traded back and forth between Poland and the Austrian Empire, which left a happy architectural legacy. Unlike the rest of Ukraine, Western Ukraine (including Lviv) was only incorporated into the USSR after World War II. In the years leading up to World War II, Lviv was part of the Second Polish Republic; the majority of its population was Polish or Jewish. After the Holocaust and the transfer of its Polish population to Poland, Lviv became an ethnically Ukrainian city.

To this day, Western Ukraine resists the influence of the Russian language in Ukraine. (The blue-and-yellow banner in the photo of the Opera and Ballet Theater above reads "One Ukraine, One State Langauge" in response to recent legislation that would make Russian a second state language in Ukraine.) Russian has historically reigned among ethnic Ukrainians in Ukraine’s big cities, but in Lviv I only heard Ukrainian on the streets. It was definitely fun to see how much I could understand through Russian. Some have said that Lviv’s residents are hostile to Russian, but I didn’t have any trouble getting around town with my Russian.

Three of us Harvard summer researchers were located within striking distance of Lviv, so we decided to meet up for the weekend and get to know the city. In our explorations of the city, we were lucky to have the assistance of my Harvard REECA classmate and Lviv native Anastasiya and her lovely sister and wonderful brother-in-law. Such nice people! Such hospitality! Such large cats! Exclamation points don’t do it justice.

While it took me almost a day to get there and a day to get back, Lviv was definitely worth visiting. I just consider it pre-gaming for my History of Ukraine class next semester.

For more pictures of Lviv, check out my album on Facebook.

McDonald's Update: Lviv

Interior of a classy McDonald's in Lviv...

Anti-McDonald's backlash!

Although its not immediately clear from the English translation, the sign plays off of the McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" slogan in Ukrainian (Я це люблю). It should really be translated in English this way: "I'm not lovin' it... / ...I'm lovin' borsch!"

Chisinau's Dendrarium

A few weekends ago, my REECA classmate Regina came to visit Chisinau for the first time since she left Moldova with her family at the age of 3. This was as good an excuse as any to leave Comrat for the weekend and go up to Chisinau and help Regina explore her native land.

Regina and I discovered the dendrarium, which apparently is the Moldovan name for a really cool botanical park. I have to say that I didn’t give Moldova enough credit. I didn’t realize there was anything this nice in the entire country. The gardens were manicured, there was no trash anywhere, and there were even lily pads. They even had a cute little train for kids! As Regina said, "Are we in Moldova or France?"

[I’ve noticed that I’ve started to adopt a very post-Soviet mentality of commenting on the cleanliness of everything. I’m not sure if this has to do with the decline in public services since the fall of the USSR or what, but it seems to be the first thing people here notice about a place.]

Since I don’t actually spend that much time in Chisinau, I still screw up the public transportation from time to time. This was definitely one of those occasions. On the way back, we just stood on the opposite side of the street, assuming that would take us back the way we came. This apparently logical thought led us sadly astray. We ended up going to the outskirts of Chisinau instead of the center. 

This was one of those moments that disproved the former Soviet stereotype of dour and unfriendly people. Several people on the bus helped us out once it became apparent that we were very lost. They alerted the bus driver to our situation, and we ended up going to the end of the line to wait until another bus left in the opposite direction to take us back to the city. Several of (shirtless) bus drivers were waiting at the end of the line and they invited us to sit with them.

I’m always slightly intimidated by bus drivers in the former Soviet Union, since they seem like a pretty tough crew. Their job involves weaving through traffic while making change at the same time, so they are usually intense. These guys were actually very nice. One was wearing a top hat, which is even weirder in Moldova than it is in the U.S. Another driver treated me to an apple and asked us what we thought of Obama. When someone asks me this question, I usually gear up to hear something racist, but this guy said he thought Obama was doing a good job and treated everyone fairly. We had a good time chatting and decided that in the end we were happy to have gotten lost!

After 15 minutes, the non-racist bus driver started the drive back to the center of Chisinau, but not before the top-hatted bus driver kissed us on our cheeks. The bus dropped us off in the center, and we rewarded ourselves with a tasty Moldovan lunch. 

Getting lost on public transportation: just think of it as a really cheap city tour!

Beşalma 2

Any trip to the south of Moldova should include a visit to the museum in the village of Beşalma devoted to Gagauz history and ethnography. I made my first trek out to Beşalma in 2010, and this year I thought a second pilgrimage was in order.

Beşalma

First, a brief digression about villages. We don’t really have villages in America; we have towns. A village is essentially a place where people have been living and farming for a long time. There are very few amenities in a village. They usually have one or two churches, a few stores, a bar, a mayor’s office, a few schools, and the rest is individual houses with vegetable gardens. Villages are not always tiny; they usually have a population of at least several thousand.

If you’re still not sure if you’re in a village, ask this question: Are the toilets indoor or outdoor? If the toilets are outdoor, you’re in a village.

There are two basic reasons this museum is so cool. First of all, it’s in a village! Villages are not exactly known for being centers of culture, so it’s incredibly strange to find a good museum in a place where the main occupations seem to be farming and shepherding. 

 Nobody understood why Karaçoban wanted this stuff!

Secondly, the museum’s founder Dimitri Karaçoban, completely on his own, without any help from the government, collected all of the objects in the museum and designed the exhibitions. Mind you, this was during the Soviet period, when nobody did anything that wasn’t sponsored by the government. Moreover, in the 1960s and ‘70s, people though it was completely bizarre that Karaçoban wanted to make a museum dedicated to Gagauz culture. During the time that Karaçoban was collecting Gagauz artifacts and making films about village life, the Gagauz language wasn’t even being taught in schools and hardly any books in Gagauz were being published. 

But first some more background about Dimitri Karaçoban. He was born in 1933 and graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Leningrad in the early 1960s. This in itself was amazing at the time. Karaçoban’s community was ravaged by war, repression and famine in the 1940s. Illiteracy among the Gagauz was very common at the beginning of the early Soviet period. Literacy rates increased considerably in the early 1950s thanks to Soviet literacy campaigns, but many people still only finished elementary school before economic necessity forced them to quit school and start working. So Dimitri Karaçoban’s matriculation at the Literary Institute was like a Native American kid from the rez enrolling at Harvard. It was incredibly rare.

According to my host dad Grigori, who grew up in Beşalma, after Karaçoban graduated from the Literary Institute, he could have taken a prestigious job in Chisinau and worked there. But Karaçoban turned them down. All he wanted to do was go back to Beşalma and write poetry. And so he did, riding around town on his bicycle, periodically pausing to jot down his latest stanza. The government-controlled publishing houses weren’t interested in publishing Karaçoban’s poetry, so he and his wife were poor. All the same, they were well-liked in the village, and kids like my host dad would come visit them and listen to Dimitri recite his poetry.

Display of books by Karaçoban in the museum

After the so-called national-awakening of the 1980’s and ‘90s, the museum started to get the respect and funding it deserved. I made the trek to Beşalma with a researcher from the Czech Republic to check it out once more.

This is a collection of women's tools from a traditional Gagauz home. In front you have a loom, in back you have a stove. If you look closely, you can see irons above the stove!

This is where people stomped on the grapes when making wine. Quaint as that is, I'm rather glad they don't make wine that way anymore.

I know this looks like a medieval torture device, but it's actually for making wine.

Moldova was caught between the Red Army and Romanian fascist troops during World War II. The shoes on the left belonged to a Beşalma resident who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. According to the guide, these are the shoes he wore as he made the long journey home after the war.

This is actually a sleigh. I'd like to ride around on this thing!

Much like in the U.S., handmade embroidery was an important part of a woman's dowry. This time around, I watched a short film of Gagauz wedding traditions recorded by Karaçoban in the 1960s. It could have been recorded in the 1860s! It was awesome to see—in color!—the lively wedding festivities. I don't have room here to describe them all, but one did involve making the couple kiss over a goose. The problem is that the goose generally tries to interfere.

We got to hear some traditional violin music in the film.

My travel companion Milan gamely made the 2 km trek with me to the cemetery to pay our respects to the grave of Karaçoban and his wife. The director of the museum was quite embarrassed about the weedy state of the cemetery and warned us in advance.

The humble grave of Lyudmila Pokrovskaya, a professor of Turkology from Leningrad who made the trek to Gagauzia to create a Cyrillic alphabet for the Gagauz language in 1957. Upon her death in 2009, she requested to be buried in Beşalma.

Dimitri and Zinaida Karaçoban