I had a busy week of studying Russian and teaching English.  My head is filled with new words and grammatical structures and exceptions, all of those terrible exceptions. It seems that once I master one small piece of the language and start to feel good about my progress a new un-pronouncable word is shown or a new layer of grammar is poured on top of my shaky foundation. In the end though it is all...

So, I have just started studying Russian…again.  Sometimes when I teach English I can be impatient with my students thinking ‘Why don’t they get this?’ or “Aren’t they thinking about the language?’, well a few Russian lessons can be very humbling.  I’ve been in Odessa for over three years and have studied off and on; I generally thought my Russian wasn’t...