Before leaving for Russia, I read that the signs in the subway stations are all in Russian. Knowing that I would be seeing a lot of those, I made a point of learning the alphabet using this site. That helped.
I also learned the numbers 1-10, which later turned to be of little to no help at all when dealing with cashiers, because most things cost more than 30 cents. I probably should have learned higher numbers to go with the money here. Somehow, I completely overlooked that I would be using money here. I had no idea what a kopek was and tried to pass one off as a ruble my first week. If you're not familiar with Russian money, look that one up and you'll understand how unimpressed the cashier was.
I'm trying to up my game. Quickly. Numbers, common phrases, basic small talk: I'm trying to cram all of these things in my head within about a week, and it's not going as smoothly as I would like. For one thing, my accent is so terrible that nobody seems to understand half of the things that fly out of my mouth. For another, the classes that I thought I would get with my employer sort of exist, but sort of don't. At the moment, at least, they're not really happening. So, I'm on my own.
In the next week or two, I'm going to try to set up a couple of language exchanges through some sites that I know about. If the language exchanges work out and I come back from them alive, I'll mention the websites by name. When you're living abroad, the Internet is your friend. Until it isn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment