Lietuviu Kalba, Russky Yezik

Living and working in such a linguistically diverse and interesting place, it seems that no matter what the conversation begins as, we all eventually end up talking about or in the smattering of other languages we share between us. I have a shelf of notebooks and dictionaries in my office that I call, “the shelf of good intentions.” It holds my Eastern European, Hungarian and Lithuanian phrase books, language textbooks, notebooks with lessons on Lithuanian and Hungarian language (plus a little of the Arabic alphabet), and now another notebook with my clumsily drawn Cyrillic alphabet for the beginning Russian class.

The fun thing about LCC is that everyone is sort of always in the process of teaching whatever language they know to those who want to learn it (whether that be English, French, Lithuanian, German, Albanian, Krgys, Ukranian, Belorussian, Latvian, Russian, Spanish, or whatnot!). This means that my brain is a pretty muddled place most of the time! I’ll inevitably use Lithuanian phrases when talking to Russian-speakers who know no more Lithuanian than I do. Or out of nowhere will pop up a Hungarian phrase that is stuck over from my year-and-a-half in “Magyaroszag.” I cling to my very limited knowledge of the magyarul because even in this part of the world, Hungarian is somewhat exotic in its unrelatedness to all the other Indo-European languages. It is my one little pebble of knowledge that keeps me from feeling like a totally lamo monolingual American. I milk it for all it’s worth, even if the sum total of my Hungarian fluency could be contained in a few notebook pages and my remaining ability to count to 1,000!

What is good, though, is that Lithuanian is a veritable cognate-paradise (paradicsom – meaning paradise AND tomato in Hungarian, interesting) compared to Hungarian. There are a lot of common roots that are familiar to English speakers, which speeds up the comprehension process greatly. Lately, I listen to sermons with only one ear of the translation headphones and my other ear listening to the Lithuanian. In social settings, I listen A LOT and closely, and most of the time I feel “aš suprantu daug, bet negaliu kalbeti” (I understand much, but am not able to speak). If I actually carved out the time to study, imagine what I could do!