Ways of learning foreign languages - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

By the time my Russian course started I already knew all the Russian letters in their various printed and handwritten forms and, thanks to my part-time study with Vera Ristich, one of the civilian instructors, I could read out aloud Russian texts quite well. I was fascinated to discover that once you've learned the Russian pronunciation rules there are virtually no exceptions to those rules. Russian children from the age of 3 or 4 years can, it seems, read any Russian text perfectly. They probably don't know what the words mean but they do know how to pronounce them correctly.

There were about eight of us on the course - all officers, but the actual numbers changed from time to time. Separate courses were run for airmen and officers for reasons which were never explained. We were a motley bunch: a wing commander pilot destined for an Air Attaché appointment (but not in the Soviet Union) and half a dozen or so flight lieutenants from various branches, several like me expecting postings to 26 Signals Unit in Berlin on completion. None of us had a Moscow appointment, which surprised me. However, we had been briefed by the RAF wing commander who commanded the school that we were not to discuss appointments with anyone, including our fellow students - but we did of course! After the first couple of weeks we were joined by another flight lieutenant who had studied Russian at University and really needed only a refresher course to bring him up to interpreter standard. For quite a while we were wary of him. He too ended up in Berlin but not at 26SU.

Our instructors were a mixture of British civilians, headed by the one we always referred to as ‘Headmaster’, much to his amusement and the disapproval of all the other instructors, and a group of splendid people who hailed originally from various eastern European countries and who spoke Russian as their first language. For all I know they were naturalised British citizens but the need to enquire into that never arose and they did not encourage questions about their past. One of them was the delightful Oleg Grigorievich Kravchenko, a large gentleman with a ready smile and endless patience - and he certainly needed the latter when teaching us. The first thing he taught us was how to pronounce his first name correctly. Most English speakers pronounce it as 'oh-leg', with the stress on the 'oh', whereas the correct Russian pronunciation is ‘al-yeg’, with the initial 'a' pronounced very faintly but the 'y' sound all important. That was our introduction to unstressed vowels, and the two different 'l' sounds in Russian! Oleg Grigorievich did not see the joke when we, rather cruelly, suggested that perhaps he spoke pre-Revolutionary Russian. Incidentally, we always had to use both his first name and his patronymic (son of Gregory) when addressing him in Russian; to miss off the patronymic would have been very rude.

Because of my pre-course study with the Linguaphone Course I'd bought months before I arrived at North Luffenham, I started with a slight advantage but that didn't last long. I have always, even in French and Latin lessons at school, found it difficult to learn vocabulary. The school method back in the late 1940s had suited me - learning paradigms of conjugations and declensions by heart from written tables (amo, amas, amat, bonus, bona, bonum, and all that). At North Luffenham most of the teaching, and all of Oleg Grigorievich’s, was done entirely in Russian. I could not get on with that. I must see a word written down before I have any chance of remembering it. I need to know the grammar rules. Simply listening to Russian didn't work for me. Every evening I had to resort to my Linguaphone tapes and the associated grammar books - although the staff did not approve - they insisted, wrongly, that I would get confused. I also bought myself a large and very expensive Russian – English dictionary that accompanied me to every lesson.

My method of learning mystified most of the other students on our course. With the exception of the wing commander, their schooling had been long after schools stopped teaching English Grammar properly, let alone foreign language grammar. Talking to them, especially in the early stages of the course, about the accusative, dative, instrumental or genitive cases, or the difference between the perfect and pluperfect tenses, for example, was a waste of time. I continued to use my Linguaphone tapes right up until the end of the course and beyond, and I firmly believe that without them I would not have passed the course.

I delighted in Russian verbs, just as I had delighted in the Latin Ablative Absolute at school (eg 'the battle having been won, Caesar returned to Rome'). Take the English sentence: ‘I went to London’. That is capable of several interpretations which have to be inferred from the context. The form, or aspect, of the verb ‘went’ in the Russian version of that sentence will precisely indicate whether I went yesterday, a long time ago, regularly, or infrequently, and whether I remained in London when I got there or returned some time later. Think how useful that is! I was also fascinated by the 14 (I think it is 14) special Russian 'verbs of motion'. That same English sentence, ‘I went to London’, merely tells the listener that I went to London at some time in the past. In Russian, different verbs are necessary to indicate how I went: on foot, by train, by sail, in a car, on skates etc. Incidentally, we learned that one has to be very careful using the Russian verb of motion 'to skate' (katatcya). Changing the first 't' in the Russian word to 'k' (kakatcya) changes the meaning to 'to soil oneself' (to put it politely), which is an entirely different sort of motion. We giggled like teenage students when we learned that. Fortunately I've never had the need to employ either verb in English or Russian - except here!

A slight digression here. When I eventually arrived in Berlin I started having private German lessons from Frau Emmy Lempfuhl, a truly delightful lady who had suffered great indignities at the hands of the invading Russians in 1945. I found to my delight that she taught the language my way! She believed that it was essential to learn grammar before vocabulary and I progressed rapidly. I also very quickly learned never, ever, to mention Russia or Russian in her presence.

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