Linguistic Gymnastics—Week I

Well, my first week of Russian language tutoring is almost over. Tomorrow (Friday) will complete my week. So far, lessons have been pretty good, with some major exceptions. What I mean is that there are times where my brain just screams “ENOUGH” and so I attempt to linguistically waddle my way through the lesson, even though I can’t really think at all. It was like that today, in fact. We were doing some review work of some basic question/answer stuff: the workbook gave me the answer, and I was supposed to create a question. What really should have taken about a minute took five. Five looooong minutes, especially for Olga, my instructor ( will try to post a picture of her soon). Anyways, it was rough. I felt really dumb. It reminds me of the time in 5th grade when I forgot how to spell “of.” I literally had to go and ask the teacher to remind me, and he kind of just looked at me with this incredulous look. Well, it was about the same, except that I think Olga has seen it all, so there was no look from her.
In fact, she has got to be one of THE most patient people. I am constantly forgetting, asking her to repeat, mispronouncing, killing the grammar, or some other linguistic fallacy—and yet she remains patient! Thank God for Olga, and other patient people like her!