a private tutor wasn’t an option at all, I prepared for my entrance exams all on my own. I attended a preparatory course at my university of choice, which involved waking up at 3am every Saturday to take an early morning train to get to Voronezh which was 250 km away. However, I wouldn’t say I had learned much, but at least I had a chance to start speaking English while talking on some philosophic issues – I would be doing a lot of that at university!
When I became a student at Foreign Languages Department of Voronezh State Pedagogical University, learning got insanely intense from the very get-go. «English is going to continue to be my boyfriend», I laughed to myself. Honestly, I didn’t mind that as at that point I was deeply in love and was ready to commit. My love grew more intense as at university classes we dived into advanced grammar and had extensive speaking practice. We would joke how after five years at Foreign Languages Department we would be ready to have extended conversations about anything under the sun. The only thing that made me suffer was Phonetics during the freshman year. Somehow I never truly attached much importance to how I sounded in English, because I had zero ear for music…
Halfway through my studies we had a course on Writing and that was got me falling for English even more. It was my first proper experience of writing creatively in it and I was feeling all the efforts I had put into writing down and memorizing that «fancy» vocabulary from all possible sources while my university classmates were out dating were paying off! Getting access to the high-speed Internet in my final year was a big milestone. I would stay up listening to a random selection of BBC podcasts or watching some TV shows. I started realizing how «real» this language was. It was then I got to have a Skype chat with a real native speaker I met on a pen pal website. Yes, back then I thought native speakers were walking gods or something!
The first teaching practice that we had in the fourth year of university was disappointing, but honestly, I didn’t quite expect I would love it at all. Working with kids had never been my thing and would never be. After that experience, I felt that my English that I had been working so insanely hard to study had been touched with some dirty hands. Of course, I would never stop working on improving my English and eventually had to let go of those feelings, because otherwise I would have gone mad – even teaching at my own university where to my astonishment, a lot of students training to become English teachers didn’t make any effort to learn at all. Or was I thinking like that just because I had been making too much of it..?
A few months before graduation I got my first job as a translator for a scientific journal in Architecture and I became a teacher at my own department a year after graduation. That was when I first traveled abroad and got a chance to practise English not only on Skype with a few more native speakers I had met. I did German as a secondary foreign language at university. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it as I wish I had studied French instead. Inspired by my trip to Italy, I started learning Italian. A bit later I got to see a bit of France, my dream country since childhood. So, I added French to my self-study plan. As a language teacher, I knew I wouldn’t be able to master either of these languages reasonably well, but I felt that unlike German that had been forced on me, those two languages were my foreign language «affairs» I would escape to whenever the teaching routine got a bit too exhausting. I also had a quick try at Spanish before a brief conference trip to Spain, but this language didn’t get me too interested for some reason. Traveling also inspired me to start a travel blog in English and to let out all the creative impulses I had been suppressing.
Conference trips to Europe really allowed me to feel the power of English as a lingua franca. Even though doing research felt intimidating, I was happy to present as long as I could do it in English. Listening to other presentations, I got exposed to a great variety of accents. Exciting networking events during the conferences gave me the opportunity to use English in more casual environments. What I realized was that real-world communication in English is a lot «messier» than we try to make it seem in the language classroom. Pronunciation or grammar mistakes, which it is part of our job to correct, do not matter that much as long as one is able to get their message across. Most teachers should be aware of that, but unless you travel internationally, it is hard to feel what you teach is completely real and is actually a communication tool.
That kid who started learning English back in the 90s had absolutely no idea she would get to travel outside her country at all. English has definitely been an extremely powerful tool in making something I wouldn’t even dare dream of a reality. So, having this power available to me makes me feel different while speaking English. I am naturally introverted and don’t feel too comfortable in big groups. But when I speak English, I generally feel more cheerful, friendly and confident as if I were exploring this new side of me I had no idea existed. I am still an introverted me in English as well, but by speaking this language I feel I am embracing internationalism and cosmopolitanism as well as celebrating all the work I have done in order to master English. I also feel my voice sounds different in English, which I had others point out as well. In Russian I feel more vulnerable and even less interesting to myself feeling the exciting new life English has offered me has been snatched away from me. It is easy to take our first languages for granted – probably that is the price we pay for the commitment we make to another language, which has been more than just a communicative tool, more than just a job which pays my bills, but a real passion. I am still confused as to how incorporate my «Russianness» into my English (i.e., international) identity. I don’t think I have developed any sort of other personality for the other languages I only know some basics of.
As the U.S. is a linguistic and cultural melting pot, I might even get to practise these extra languages (German, Italian, French, Spanish) while I’m there. Honestly, I had never expected I would get to go to this country – especially for such an extended amount of time. I can’t believe I have won a Fulbright scholarship, which my English has certainly played a part in. Actually, as an English teacher, I was expected to go to the UK first, because in Russia we were taught and some say they teach (I’m not one of them) the British variety of English. Now I see this language as truly international and not belonging to any specific country. That is how I like to feel when I speak and particularly write in it. Yes, I feel a lot of us (i.e., non-natives) have to claim the ownership of this language.
I know I am going to be in a country where English (there is no official language in the U.S., by the way) is predominantly spoken. However, I am more excited not about linguistic adventures (which I am sure I am in for), but cultural experiences with people all over the world – fellow Fulbrighters as well as other internationals living in the U.S. As Fulbrighters we are also supposed to be «cultural ambassadors» of our respective countries, which is a daunting role knowing that you might be the first person from Russia someone is going to meet. Also, given the never-ending political tensions between Russia and the U.S., I realize when I return home, fellow Russians would expect me to be their guide into what life in the U.S. is like. Some might even think I have somehow betrayed my home country by going to America, which some Russians think is our number-one enemy… There will be definitely be others wondering why someone would even come back from what might be paradise on Earth… All I know is that it is going to be complicated, but exciting as well!
Even though the Russian society is still divided over how the West (how it is collectively imagined) is to be treated, a lot of Russians – at least those living in bigger cities – have a more nuanced understanding of life abroad due to having been able to travel internationally, which has certainly become more accessible for some. So, the «iron curtain» mindset cultivated in the USSR when overseas traveling was restricted is no longer ever-present. Going abroad is no longer universally seen almost as flying to the Moon. English is no longer seen as something abstract and simply prestigious either. Even though it is not widely spoken in Russia, more active