Monday, February 12, 2007

Useless post; please skip

Unfortunately, I am not much of a writer myself. And, what is much more important, I feel very bad about flooding potential readers with posts of the sort "This morning I woke up. Then I brushed my teeth. I had such and such for breakfast. By the way, Japanese is very hard to learn."

For this reason, I am trying to keep my musings to a minimum. Currently I am busy translating my self-introduction; it turned out to be harder than I thought, even though 90% of it is in katakana-transliterated loanwords anyway. I hope to post it here in a few days.

2 comments:

satoza said...

Oh, I am interested in reading your post.

I just wonder how many languages you speak and how you learned. Was it hard?

Cyril Shmatov said...

Professor,

Russian is my native; I am also more or less fluent in English. Most of my English vocabulary I picked up here in NYC already after joining grad school, although I studied a bit of English in elementary and junior high school before that.

I can also speak a little bit of ukrainian, although it is not a "real" language, rather a specific russian dialect.

In general, I am extremely bad at learning languages, and acquiring at least some English is a miracle. For the same reason, I do not speak any other tongues. In college, I tried to take classes in German, with no success whatsoever. Unfortunately, my knowledge of German remained at the level of "Ya-ya, das ist fantastisch".