Stories
The physiology of Nickolai Bernstein
Evolution of
the brain
and social behavior
Learning languages
* * *
My first serious work in language was for my trip to Russia, but there was already a base. When I was about 13, my English teacher gave me a Latin book and helped me learn to read in Latin. It gave me the understanding of the roots of languages, which has always helped me. At Columbia, I took a French course, where I did not learn much, but later I took a graduate course in linguistics with the great linguist Joseph Greenberg, and found it fascinating.
In preparation for going to the Soviet Union I undertook seriously to learn Russian. For the first time in many years I went back to class, taking the intensive Russian language course at Yale summer school in 1975.
When I arrived in the Soviet Union, I didn't know anyone who spoke English so I had to speak only Russian, halting at first, but improvement came soon as I worked with people in the lab who were very patient with me.
|
In order to get a good accent, I bought a copy of the poem Evgeny Onegin of Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet, along with a tape recording by a good Russian actor reading the poem. And I began to memorize. At one time I could recite a full hour of Evgeny Onegin from memory. And as I fell asleep at night I would recite verses from memory and study their grammatical construction. I came to love the sound of Russian poetry. And no wonder. Pushkin, like the poet Dante in Italy, took the language that he found and added endings for his rhymes. Like Dante, he can be said to have "invented" the modern language of his country, and, in both cases, the language is a language of poetry (and opera, too, of course). To me, poetry is like music. In Moscow I went to the films of Tarkovsky and to the Tanganke Theatre with my colleague Sasha Kotov. It was a wonderful, avante-garde theatre, as dramatic and imaginative as any in the world (see poster on the left). And I went to the Bolshoi - I remember especially a memorable performance of Anna Karenina with the music of Shchedrin and the dancing, one of her last performances, of Maya Plisetskaya. A few years later I spent a memorable night with students in the film school discussing the films of Tarkovsky who was their hero. His film "Stalker" written several years before the events themselves was eerily prescient of Chernobyl. |
Part of my work at UNESCO involved learning new languages. First there was French which was the language of the workplace at UNESCO. Then came Spanish and Portuguese for my work in national culture of peace programmes located in El Salvador and Mozambique, respectively.
Once again, I used the poetry method of learning languages. For French I memorized an hour of Rimbaud's "Une Saison en Enfer," from an excellent tape recording by a French actor. And for Portuguese I started from the classic 15th Century Os Lusiades, although I never truly became fluent.
 |
Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme