Before coming to Moscow, I worried about a variety of different things. Would I be able to communicate with people? Would I get lost in the city? Would I miss home too much? Strangely, thinking about classwork never really crossed my mind. I envisioned taking some kind of language classes and beyond that I just knew that I would hopefully improve my Russian and all would be well. However, after having taken almost four weeks of classes, I must say that the style of classes here as well as the challenge of taking classes completely in a foreign language has been real.
To begin with, we have phonetics, in which we try to pronounce sounds that our tongues seem incapable of making. My biggest challenge with this class is simply not laughing while my classmates and I repeatedly make baby sounds (“me me me”). It is incredibly strange to be evaluated on how well you can manipulate your mouth to make words and so frustrating when we are unable to perform as our professor would like. It has also been eye opening just how strong our accents are. Nonetheless, phonetics class is hugely rewarding in that I can see the progress we are making (or rather hear it) and learning about how Russian is spoken also makes it much easier to understand people in the real world.
We also have conversation practice class, in which we discuss, among other things, our love lives, our future spouses, and whether or not we would like to have children. My professor will often ask me and Dilara, the only other female student in our class, what we think about something “as women.” Gender relations in Russia are noticeably different than back home, even in the classroom. Another major difference between our classes back at Carleton: here, if you say a wrong answer, you will be told immediately that you are wrong. If you think too long about something, you will be told to hurry up. Our professor will often reprimand us for forgetting things that we should have learned. She has no problem pointing out that, while your presentation may have been decent, you made three tense mistakes and she wrote down every one of them. This is not to say that our professors are in any way unkind. In fact, I love having class with all of them. Having someone badger you about your mistakes makes you more aware of your speech and I can even get used to having my professor yelling at me for laughing while trying to pronounce the word “monastery” for the fortieth time in a row.

Finally, we have grammar, which requires the most concentration and patience. Our professor has a systematic way of working through exercises that forces us to deal with all the pesky bits of Russian that I think most of us would rather forget. Yesterday we discussed the usage rules of the verbs «пользоваться» and «использовать» which frustratingly both mean “to use.” It is even more difficult when we have to ask clarifying questions about using the verb “to use” and how to pick which verb for “to use” to use.
All of this is to say that classes are a big part of our daily life and have highlighted to me both the incredible richness and depth of the Russian language as well as the mountain of things I need to learn before I will truly be able to understand this language.