Comments for Fluent Historian

Comment on Victory Day by Natalie

Natalie — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:11:18 +0000

Hey, nice to have you commenting again. Yes, I definitely agree. I feel like there’s a fine line between remembering a war and glorifying it. Admittedly Russia might cross that line sometimes! But I definitely know what you’re saying. I like reading about World War II (because I love history), but I really, really, really hope there is never a war like it again. Just the fact that we’ve had two world wars already makes me very sad. That cemetery does looks beautiful, but very sad. Thanks for telling me about it.

Comment on Victory Day by zsuzsi

zsuzsi — Thu, 09 May 2013 08:35:29 +0000

Hi!
Wars (and those who died) should be remembered but not glorified.
In Bratislava there is a Soviet military cemetery -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slav%C3%ADn. The place is beautiful, but going there always makes me so sad. Just think of all the things these people could have done (and the lives they could have led) had they not died somewhere far from home.

Comment on What is the Best Language to Learn? by Natalie

Natalie — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:07:02 +0000

Sarai, I definitely agree. To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to non-English combinations, which is quite silly. Now that I think about it, I met someone via Twitter who worked from Russian into Spanish. As far as I know, she makes a pretty good living doing that.

Good luck with your Russian!

Comment on What is the Best Language to Learn? by Sarai

Sarai — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:20:41 +0000

After having read the original post by Corinne, I think we (i.e. those who translate into or out of English) are a bit biased in that we think of combinations involving English only. For example, I’m sure a Japanese to Arabic or vice versa translator might be able to make a good living, or a Russian to Hindi translator, as I saw recently on ProZ. I think, as per one of your previous posts, it all depends on how much time you’re willing to invest in learning languages – I mean, Japanese took me four years of occasional studying and four years of constant, virtually daily practice and learning – and I still feel like I’m light years behind Sure, it is a language pair (JP-EN) with a great deal of earning potential, but you also have to rack up a good number of years of experience in the translation industry. Currently I’m working on perfecting my German and starting to learn Russian, and I’d like to see where I’ll be going from there – I’m thinking Finnish… actually, having said all that, the best language one can learn is to master one’s mother tongue to a freakishly high degree of fluency – I find myself learning new English words every day, despite having spoken it every single day for 30 years.

Comment on The End is in Sight by Economics Class | Fluent Historian

Economics Class | Fluent Historian — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:04:51 +0000

[...] shaved off about one-third of the material because people could not keep up. I’ve said this before: I don’t mind it when people ask questions. What is annoying is when one person monopolizes [...]

Comment on The State of the Russian Language by Natalie

Natalie — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 04:11:36 +0000

That is true. One must have a very thick skin to go on the internet.

Comment on The State of the Russian Language by Da Russophile

Da Russophile — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:04:46 +0000

Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but couldn’t this commenter have picked a different example sentence in Ukrainian?

It’s the Internet.

Comment on Are You a Different Person When Speaking Different Languages? by Natalie

Natalie — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:27:38 +0000

Funny, I didn’t feel that way about the UK at all. Maybe because I spent most of my time outside London, which is a pretty cosmopolitan city.

I like the whole bicultural idea. I can definitely relate. And thanks for sharing the story of Scyles. I was a history major, but I don’t know much about ancient history at all, so it was nice to learn something new.

Comment on Are You a Different Person When Speaking Different Languages? by Natalie

Natalie — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:02:13 +0000

Funny, I’m the total opposite! I find myself to be hilarious in Russian, but not that funny in English.

Comment on Are You a Different Person When Speaking Different Languages? by Kenny

Kenny — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:58:22 +0000

On the contrary, when I have visited the UK, in some ways it didn’t seem foreign enough. It can seem like American cultural hegemony is everywhere you look: theme parks, fast-food restaurants, even American-style masterplan suburban developments (with less of an emphasis on detached housing, but, nonetheless, the American ideal of homeownership is palpable). I have come to appreciate many of the traditional dialectical features of UK standard English, but I have noticed with some chagrin incursions of American English. For example, I love how Englishmen and women “ring” each other when they want to communicate by phone, but I have also heard some Britons say they “call” people like Americans. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before dustbin lorries get replaced by garbage trucks.

When I speak Russian, I believe I express most of the same thoughts that I would otherwise produce in English. There are, of course, radically different lexical features, many of them adapted to describing Russian cultural phenomena. (I was having a conversation with my friend the other day about the sport of городки and how it was featured on the classic Soviet-era cartoon Ну, погоди!, and I think it would be difficult to translate/interpret our conversation into English without lots of explanations).

One of my professors, who has been teaching Russian and travelling to Russia for more than 40 years, likes to say that he is “bicultural,” and that he becomes a different person when he speaks Russian. Yet he speaks both Russian and English with a Minnesota accent, and he acts like a perfect American given that he smiles all the time, talks loudly and is willing to shake everyone’s hand firmly. So, in a way, it can be rather hard to assume another cultural identity, even when you are speaking another language.

Yet humans have tried to do just this for a long time now, and perhaps in the past it was a much more perilous venture than it is today. I like to recount Herodotus’s story of Scyles, a Scythian prince who fell in love with Greek culture. He tried to lead two lives: outside the walls of the Greek city of Olbia on the Black Sea he led the life of a Scythian chieftain, but inside the city he donned Greek robes, took part in religious mysteries and kept a Greek wife. However, his tribesmen eventually found out about his second life, and they believed that Scyles betrayed his Scythian identity by becoming Greek. He was killed by his brother.