Yellow Blue Bus when spoken quickly is the Russian word for I Love You. Just one of the fun ways we’ve been learning this new language, with our own silly English fusion to help us remember phrases.
Communicating in Ukraine has been very entertaining and also the most difficult month yet. Hardly anyone speaks English, which of course we don’t expect since we are in their country we should know their language. Those that do know English chose not to use it. We have wonderful contacts that both speak excellent English and are helping us tremendously bridge this gap.
The Russian alphabet has a lot of Greek letters and can’t be read like English, but we’re leaning to decipher some of the letters to pick out some words and basic signage. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet) Sort of like a treasure hunt for symbols you know when trying to read a map on the bus and read street signs while bumping along the potholed roads. When we aren’t with our contact’s who translate through us we try communicating through Russian and German to English.
Alexea, our roommate for the two weeks that we are in Krosnormesk is Ukrainian, but Russian is spoken by everyone as we are so close to the border. (In the photo, he’s sitting on the floor with his feet out at our house church) We discovered the other day when we were having a lovely conversation in Russian and charades that he learned German in High School. Brian and I both learned Spanish, BUT in college I had friends from Germany studying abroad for the year that helped me with a little bit of conversational German! SO we somehow had a semi-common language of German to communicate through. Granted I don’t know much German, but I know more German that Russian. We were so excited to discover this and were able to carry on our conversation a wee bit easier incorporating both Russian and German words all the while he was learning some English and I some Russian along the way.
I believe this is the fastest way to learn a language. Be put in a living environment where you have to communicate at least some of the time and you will find a way to sort it all out with plenty of patience and lots of laughing at each other. This has helped tremendously when out in public shopping at the market and upon meeting new people as well. This is obviously not the first time we’ve had to learn a new language this year, but it is however the first time having a roommate from another country that doesn’t speak English. And we love it!
As you can imagine your brain get’s a bit confused at times especially at this point when you’ve got so many previous languages stored up for at least basic conversation words of the places we’ve been. I’ve even found myself combining languages in to one sentence and doing the same writing. Makes for entertaining conversation even within our team! We often wonder how many things we’ve said this year when out in public have gotten lost in translation…
