My poor birds! I returned home to the rather unpleasant news that the idiot petsitter we hired was feeding my birds wrong. Instead of feeding them seed, she fed them pellets, which they do not eat as their main staple. Luckily, we were only gone two days. If we had been gone any longer, they probably would have died.

Tomorrow should be interesting, as we have to meet with said petsitter to pick up the house key, and said petsitter does not yet know of the wrong she committed.

What you do when you’re procrastinating is probably what you should be doing for the rest of your life.

That’s one of my friend’s favorite quotes. And if it’s actually true, then I definitely ought to be doing something related to Slavic languages, writing, and history.

A few days ago, I spent hours reading this article about the Ukrainian language and this article about Ukrainian grammar. I know a lot of people think grammar is boring and uninteresting, but I rather enjoy it.

What do you do in your spare time?

I’m graduating today, which is why I thought it would be appropriate to write some advice for people who have not yet started university.

• Grades are paramount. Seriously. Don’t party every night and blow off your studying. You don’t need a perfect 4.0, but put a decent amount of effort into your classes. Having a high GPA gives you opportunities you otherwise would not have.
• Make friends. Not to contradict the previous point, but don’t spend so much time studying that you have no friends. That’s just sad.
• You know all that stuff your advisors tell you, about being able to “explore new classes” when you first come in? That’s a lie. You need to have a good idea from the start about what you want to major in. If you honestly have no idea, then spend your first year fulfilling requirements. At my school, we had a writing requirement, a math requirement, and requirements in various fields. When I switched my major after first year, I was still able to use classes I had taken for my old major to fulfill my science and math requirements, so that worked out. But I never did get to take that economics class I wanted.
• Study abroad. It is amazing. Go to a different country for a semester or a year (personally, I think summer study abroads are kind of lame, but that’s just me).
• Sign up for a foreign language. Find one you like and start studying it first year. If you stay with it and do lots of work, you’ll graduate with a pretty high level.

Congratulations to the class of 2012! We have another graduation ceremony tomorrow, so I’ll post more advice if I can think of anything.

Congratulations, class of 2012!

A parakeet that escaped Sunday from its home in Yokohama, Japan, has been reunited with its owner after belatedly telling police where it lived, the Kyodo News agency reports.

Fumie Takahashi’s bird flew its coop in the Sagamihara district on Sunday. It made its way into the city center, flying into a hotel and perching on the shoulder of a guest.

Police took the the baby-blue budgie back to jail, where for three days it demonstrated it was no stool pigeon. Then Tuesday night, it suddenly piped up, reciting its address in the concrete jungle, right down to the block and house number, Kyodo says, by way of the London Telegraph.

And of course, I’m sure you want to see a photo of the bird.

Yet another reason why my birds need to learn how to speak!

This was taken at Strada, the best Italian restaurant in the United Kingdom. I went there only twice and both times were excellent.

So I really don’t have a problem getting people to visit my blog – the issue is making sure they stay. I am not sure how successful I am in doing that, as my site counter uses cookies to determine if someone is a repeat visitor or not. Since it is relatively simple to delete cookies, I could theoretically have more repeat visitors than I think.

Happy Mother’s Day! My mom and I are going to eat cupcakes today – at a quilt shop. We haven’t spent Mother’s Day together since 2008 (which is just depressing – thank goodness I’m home earlier than usual this year).

How printed and cursive Cyrillic differ

On the first day of Russian class, we started learning to read and write the Cyrillic alphabet. Russians always write in cursive, and cursive Cyrillic differs slightly from printed Cyrillic, so it can be quite confusing at first. My professor said he emphasized learning cursive because if you don’t write in cursive, people will think you are illiterate. I hated cursive at first because it confused me, but then I got used to it (after a while).

"Together we will win!"

However, I think my experience differed a bit from my classmates’. You see, I had already learned the Russian alphabet before I ever set foot in class. I taught myself over the summer and learned to read it from politicians’ names (Дмитрий Медведев – Dmitry Medvedev) and political slogans (Вместе победим! – Together we will win!). This was 2008, so Russia had just held presidential elections. Stuff like this was so helpful, though it was quite a while before I understood the grammar concerning the verb used in the “Together we will win” poster.*

Still, even though I may have had a slight advantage over my classmates, first-year Russian was still really, really hard. I am glad now that I had this excellent foundation, but at the time, I remember being very frustrated. We had at least an hour of homework every night, class every day (and twice one day of the week), and so many exams. It probably took me a good eleven months or so before I could read Cyrillic with as much fluidity as I read the Latin alphabet. (Memorizing and knowing an alphabet is quite different from actually putting the letters together to form words.)

So, the question remains: is it wise to throw all this new stuff at beginning students all at once? It depends. For full-time students and those who need a solid foundation quickly, I say to go ahead and take the plunge. Learn vocabulary, reading, and writing all at once. (Trust me, it is possible.) For adults with real jobs taking a Russian class for fun, doing all of that could be a lot to handle, so there would not be any harm in going at a slower pace.

To be honest, I don’t know if it’s normal to start off doing cursive right away. My professor is very dedicated and very intense. He’s a native speaker, passionate about teaching others his language. I do know that I learned more Russian from him than my American friend C I met during my study abroad. At the time, C had studied Russian for as long as I had (in fact, even longer because she did a summer program and I did not), but I spoke it better than she did, which I think was due to having a very intense professor teaching me.

One valid criticism Erard had in his book was how the material was boring. I had that same problem: our textbook was not that great. The dialogues were kind of stupid and inane sometimes. Luckily I was interested in the language itself – it helped to have a goal in mind, which for me was to read Russian literature in the original – and my professor engaged us by teaching us things not in the textbook.

It is very interesting for me to think about this because I’m considering becoming a professor. Someday, I could be teaching a Russian class (that would be SO much fun), so I’ve enjoyed thinking about how I would approach it.

*If you’re interested, it’s due to imperfective vs. perfective in Russian. Победить is the perfective form of the verb because we’re talking about a one-time action here. For Russian learners, the imperfective form is побеждать (remember, you should always try to learn both aspects of the verb!).

Overall, I loved the book. Erard’s focus is what he calls hyperpolyglots, or those polyglots who speak an incredible amount of languages, usually eleven or more. Erard begins the book by writing of his journey to Italy to learn more about Cardinal Mezzofanti, an Italian who lived in the nineteenth century who knew an extraordinary amount of languages (I’ve most commonly seen thirty-nine as the alleged amount he spoke). My favorite Mezzofanti anecdote is one in which he met a Russian prince who spoke Ukrainian. Mezzofanti was fascinated by Ukrainian and learned to speak it in two weeks. (If only I could learn Ukrainian in two weeks!)

Erard then tracked down living hyperpolyglots, including Alexander Arguelles. One misconception about hyperpolyglots is that they have equal abilities in all their languages, all the time. This simply isn’t the case, as the author found time and time again. Hyperpolyglots participating in a language-speaking contest had to reactivate and review some of their languages prior to competing.

Some studies have shown that hyperpolyglots have different brain structure than the rest of us. For example, scientists found that the arrangement of cells in a preserved hyperpolyglot’s brain was different compared to other people.

My only complaint about the book relates to the author’s amusing anecdote about taking a Russian class. He criticized the teacher for teaching the students to write the Cyrillic alphabet in cursive right from the start. This is normal because everyone writes in cursive in Russian – if you don’t, people will think you’re illiterate, according to my Russian professor. I don’t dispute that the author’s experience in the Russian class was frustrating due to bad teaching – I just wanted to say that some of his criticisms are unfounded.

Overall, Babel No More is an excellent book and I would highly recommend it. (Michael Erard is also a very nice person who will talk to you on Twitter, if you so desire.)