with English. My sister, who was in Grade 8 back then, was doing exceptionally and unbelievably well academically, particularly in the Russian language. She had been winning all sorts of school competitions and was featured in a local newspaper a few times.
Deep down inside, I wanted to be at least a tiny bit as smart as my sister I saw working with huge dictionaries of Russian. Not wanting to be a complete «copycat», I picked up a visual dictionary of English. Somehow I had a gut feeling it was going to be a truly «big» moment in my life. It wasn’t large so by the end of the summer, I had studied it from cover to cover. I picked up a few more English books – including the legendary (in the former USSR, anyway) English course by Наталья Бонк (Natalia Bonk) and noticed I was getting more and more interested…
In the early 2000s music was the only window into a «foreign» (Western) world. Once I heard some songs by a British pop band on a radio show hosted by a Russian journalist living in London (which seemed to be somewhere on the Moon!). They somehow stroke a chord with me and sparked my interest in English even more. What I really loved was reading and translating their song lyrics my sister’s friend downloaded from the Internet for me (I didn’t even get my first computer till Grade 10). I would keep notes of any new vocabulary I came across.
School classes of English where we did nothing but do boring grammar exercises and translate texts from English into Russian had become nothing but an obligation. I realized that early on I would have to take responsibility for my own learning. So, I ended up with an inconsistent «diet» of whatever textbooks I could get my hands on. I did all the tasks in writing in a thick notebook and used the answer key to check my answers.
Eventually my teacher (the same that would still scream and yell at us) noticed my interest in her subject and I became her favorite. It seemed as if she was occasionally even relying on me for translations! I was hoping I had started to prove I wasn’t «the family’s disgrace». I can’t think of any difficulties I had at that point at all. I loved every minute of my independent learning, which seemed to be the most enjoyable thing unlike all those boring school classes (probably apart from Russian and Literature). Or I might have loved English too much by that point to even start noticing any difficulties.
It wasn’t until I participated in regional school competitions in English that I realized I couldn’t speak like those kids from the region’s capital! I had trained myself quite well in grammar and vocabulary, but it hadn’t ever occurred to me what I had been doing all of that for. I had treated English more as a funny game without thinking it was an actual language you had to speak!
As there were still no opportunities to practise speaking, I continued working with the other aspects. For reading I had some classics and a few Oxford readers. Apart from listening to a few audiobooks on my tape recorder and later a CD-player, I studied a video course on CD-ROM after we had finally got a computer. I didn’t pay much attention to writing. I only wish I had attempted to write in English creatively while still at high school.
Anyway, I knew well before I had finished school that English would be my future career. I was obsessed with it while my classmates were going on first dates and having fun. «English is your boyfriend», I remember one of them saying trying to make fun of that boring «nerd» I was considered to be. «Probably that was true», I thought to myself and stayed focused on my goals. One of the crucial ones was to pass my university exams to be able to study for free. In the early 2000s English was considered a prestigious foreign language as probably everything which had a word «foreign» in it. So, getting into Foreign Language Departments were very challenging. I chose the teaching path over the translating one, because it was more accessible for kids from small towns like myself who could only afford to study for free.
As hiring a private tutor wasn’t an option at all, I prepared for my entrance exams all on my own. I attended a preparatory course at my university of choice, which involved waking up at 3am every Saturday to take an early morning train to get to Voronezh which was 250 km away. However, I wouldn’t say I had learned much, but at least I had a chance to start speaking English while talking on some philosophic issues – I would be doing a lot of that at university!
When I became a student at Foreign Languages Department of Voronezh State Pedagogical University, learning got insanely intense from the very get-go. «English is going to continue to be my boyfriend», I laughed to myself. Honestly, I didn’t mind that as at that point I was deeply in love and was ready to commit. My love grew more intense as at university classes we dived into advanced grammar and had extensive speaking practice. We would joke how after five years at Foreign Languages Department we would be ready to have extended conversations about anything under the sun. The only thing that made me suffer was Phonetics during the freshman year. Somehow I never truly attached much importance to how I sounded in English, because I had zero ear for music…
Halfway through my studies we had a course on Writing and that was got me falling for English even more. It was my first proper experience of writing creatively in it and I was feeling all the efforts I had put into writing down and memorizing that «fancy» vocabulary from all possible sources while my university classmates were out dating were paying off! Getting access to the high-speed Internet in my final year was a big milestone. I would stay up listening to a random selection of BBC podcasts or watching some TV shows. I started realizing how «real» this language was. It was then I got to have a Skype chat with a real native speaker I met on a pen pal website. Yes, back then I thought native speakers were walking gods or something!
The first teaching practice that we had in the fourth year of university was disappointing, but honestly, I didn’t quite expect I would love it at all. Working with kids had never been my thing and would never be. After that experience, I felt that my English that I had been working so insanely hard to study had been touched with some dirty hands. Of course, I would never stop working on improving my English and eventually had to let go of those feelings, because otherwise I would have gone mad – even teaching at my own university where to my astonishment, a lot of students training to become English teachers didn’t make any effort to learn at all. Or was I thinking like that just because I had been making too much of it..?
A few months before graduation I got my first job as a translator for a scientific journal in Architecture and I became a teacher at my own department a year after graduation. That was when I first traveled abroad and got a chance to practise English not only on Skype with a few more native speakers I had met. I did German as a secondary foreign language at university. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it as I wish I had studied French instead. Inspired by my trip to Italy, I started learning Italian. A bit later I got to see a bit of France, my dream country since childhood. So, I added French to my self-study plan. As a language teacher, I knew I wouldn’t be able to master either of these languages reasonably well, but I felt that unlike German that had been forced on me, those two languages were my foreign language «affairs» I would escape to whenever the teaching routine got a bit too exhausting. I also had a quick try at Spanish before a brief conference trip to Spain, but this language didn’t get me too interested for some reason. Traveling also inspired me to start a travel blog in English and to let out all the creative impulses I had been suppressing.
Conference trips to Europe really allowed me to feel the power of English as a lingua franca. Even though doing research felt intimidating, I was happy to present as long as I could do it
