The Children of Cyril - Russian language

I was interested in the Russian language long before I decided to visit Russia itself, so I was curious to hear Russian in its native habitat. I was not disappointed: essentially everyone in Russia speaks Russian in public.

The Russian I learned was quite literary, with an emphasis on proper grammar and pronunciation rather than fluidity. That is what I want in the long term, but I found that a knowledge of verbal adverbs and emphatic impersonal constructions is not very useful for speaking or understanding in real-life situations. 95% of the time, the discussion is how much something costs, what is included, or when something will occur. There are phrases which recur often (eg <<Это всё?>>). Once I got used to a certain situation, like buying train tickets, things usually went smoothly. My lack of vocabulary was a persistent problem. Partway through, I started using more of an English accent because I found people were less confused by my broken Russian that way.

This will sound silly, but one of the biggest surprises I had in Russia was hearing day-to-day Russian conversation. To me, Russian has only ever been the language of literary heroes, Soviet General Secretaries, and other larger-than-life cultural exports. Instead, I found an endless variety of individuals discussing, demanding, soothing, whining, gossiping, declaring, and grumbling their way through the day. Most of it was too colloquial for me to understand, but my comprehension improved with time. It was especially interesting to hear young children--their childish lapses are quite different than the errors my classmates and I made.

I identified four or five different accents: two proper, studied accents which were consistent throughout the country and several regional demotic accents. It took me a week or so to get used to a new one.

I bought 6 books in Russia: Grey-Eyed King by Anna Akhmatova; Tales by Lev Tolstoi; Short Stories by Chekhov; The Brothers Karamotzov by Dostoevsky; Lir, King of the Steppe by Turgenev; and a Russian dictionary (Сероглазый Король по Ахматовой, Повести и Рассказы по Толстому, Рассказы Повести по Чехову, Братья Карамазовы по Достоевскому, Степной Король Лир по Тургеневу, Словарь Русского Языка по Ожегову). They were $4-$20 each; a new hardcover in Canada would be ten times that. I started with the Tolstoi because he specifically wrote it for children and semi-literate peasants.

I was taken aback in St Petersburg when I saw a lot of pseudo-English signage. (The sign below approximates "Coffee House" in Cyrillic.) Other examples were "China Town" and "Smile." I have no objection to new words like "fax" or "website," but using anglicisms for existing Russian phrases just sounds ugly. Luckily, it was mostly only in the high-end fashion districts of European Russia. I suppose that, for some, English is associated with wealth and prestige.
A similar phenomenon was the ubiquity of terrible pseudo-American pop music. Almost every public place--restaurants, buses, malls, grocery stores--played 90's-style synth-pop. The Russian singers would sing inane English lyrics. To wit:

I am a black man
I am a black man
I want to dance with you
I want to dance with you
Baby, be my girl tonight
(etc.)

(This despite the fact that we didn't see a single black person the whole time we were in Russia.)

I'm at a loss to explain it. People must like it, or it wouldn't get so much play. I don't know much about 80's mainstream Soviet music--perhaps it was so terrible that the public chose this instead. As far as I know, Russians generally have refined music tastes.

The Russian language is safe in one sense: during our travels, we heard Russian 99.9% of the time. In tourist areas of Moscow and St Petersburg, we heard various European languages, and occasionally we heard other ex-Soviet languages. But generally, everyone seemed to speak Russian. (In large Canadian cities, English or French is only spoken 80% of the time.) Even manual labourers, who are clearly not ethnic Russian, would speak perfect Russian.

Another thing which interested me was seeing the pre-1917 alphabet. (The Bolsheviks simplified it from about 40 letters to 33.) We saw it in museum exhibits, church inscriptions, and old plaques. I can read the old alphabet, but very slowly.

The old:
The new:It was also interesting to see graphic design (advertising, signage) using the Cyrillic alphabet. There are different "rigid," "organic," and "ornamented" shapes for letters and words. For instance, the letter ф could be a fountain, like so: . (The German and Korean alphabets were presented differently as well.)

Now that I am back in Canada, I will read the books I bought to improve my vocabulary, and I will try to find a Russian language exchange or conversation club.