Russians love poetry. Especially St. Petersburgians. I've never met a group of people so well-versed in poetry and literature. Not only do they burst into spontaneous poetry recitation in daily conversation (usually when the topic of discussion reminds them of a good poem), they also highly revere the persona of Russian writers and can provide extensive information about their lives, their families, where and when they wrote, and the symbolism and meaning of their works. It's also interesting to note that this love of literature is not class specific. I've heard professors, office workers, students, museum guides, a slightly-not-all-there guy on the street, and even a babushka selling flowers (what some would call a "bag lady") reciting poetry.
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| The Cyrillic Alphabet |
This week I've been taking advantage of my private lessons to work a lot on phonetics, so I've been paying extra attention to intonation, stress, timbre, and rhythm. And, following the advice of my professor, I've been reading aloud to myself to practice all of these things and to increase my reading speed. (Since Russian is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, learning to read in Russian is quite literally like going back to Kindergarten. It takes time to learn to sight read - to recognize new and ever-bigger words without having to sound them out.) After running across a short poem in my new Russian textbook a few days ago, and then reflecting on Russians' love of poetry, I decided that reading and memorizing a few poems could give me some interesting conversation material when I'm making new Ukrainian friends, and could also really help
убирать ("remove") my accent, as they say in Russian. The word is pronounced "oobeeROT" but spelled "ubirat" and for some reason it always makes me think of the English word "obliterate." It's funny how our brains make such connections, often subconsciously. Bottom line: I'd really like to obliterate my accent.
