When I was taught Russian language in my childhood, I was trained to do as little mistakes as possible. The language is super complicated, and as my teacher used to say, it’s second most complicated language in the world, with first being Chinese. I do believe Chinese is the most complicated one, but I’m not sure about the Russian. I know it very well, and as I’m acquiring knowledge of other languages, I understand how artificial it is.
It’s the most artificial language I know so far. It has some history though. The history of stealing, but not admitting it.
My school teacher was super talented in that leakage. What a waste of talent!
We have this issue of Belarusian language in Belarus. It’s gone. It’s persecuted, humiliated, and marginalised. This topic it’s bigger than it appears. But in the current context, it means I acquired this fear of making a mistake, while speaking Belarusian.
A couple of years back, probably before the current war (in its current genocidal phase), I heard this phrase, it stayed with me. ‘You are not afraid of making a mistake while using your native language.’
You are not afraid of making a mistake while using your native language.
Just why not repeat it twice, right?
It was just now, it seems, when I realised I was afraid of making a mistake in that stupid language for idiots, Russian.
I started being fluent in Ukrainian the moment I realised I don’t care about mistakes. I’m very good now. Nobody can tell I’m not a local, and that’s quite an achievement in my book. People don’t believe I’m not local. Friends are surprised and compliment my skill. Policemen and military were suspicious.
That’s fucking terrifying sometimes. Once military guys suspected me in making up some scheme to avoid military draft. I told them I never had a Ukrainian passport, not that I dropped it to not serve in the military. That’s pleasant to hear people being suspicious when I say I’m not a citizen. But that’s not in some situations, huh.
My English skill developed differently, as I had very natural very strong motivation to learn. I had quite a big number of books to read. At some point, I just realised I don’t want to speak Russian any more.
My workmates were a bit of a ballast in that regard. I left the clients. Then I left the team, and some of them speak different languages now! Wow! What a genocidal neighbours can achieve for those they haven’t slaughtered yet.
I started speak English freely when I dropped that fear of making a mistake. A friend of mine, he was terrified to talk, and started every single conversation with the apologise of him speaking bad. Yeah, what a great way to start a conversation! I kept telling him to drop that, relax, and just speak. It’s getting easier when you do.
I’m tossing in my bed, thinking million of unconnected thoughts. When I realised that dropping Russian language — a so hard to achieve skill! — was never a difficult thing to me. I just realised it’s absolutely useless. Speaking Belarusian, I can freely speak Ukrainian with almost no problems. More likely, I’d be able to speak Polish within half a year of living in the country. And I’m sure I’d be able to mimic the locals if I’m happen to live there for a year or so. It must be much easier when you know Belarusian and Ukrainian well. There’s no other language Russian will help you to study. That’s why those dumb fucks usually speak no other language. While Chinese, I think, at least their language is superior in many ways (as a minimum, you can read much quicker in Chinese!). And is ancient. And… it’s just not pathetic, and is spoken by … how many? Billions of people? Russian … well, gives you mostly nothing. More than that, you’re getting an ability to understand some of the most incredibly stupid people. Those Russians who are smart, they will speak other language. If you ever willing to befriend one, for some reason.
Dropping Russian was never a thing. It just freed some space in my head, for more valuable skills. I am not afraid of mistakes, I do then all the time with my first language, English. I do them all the time with my second language, Ukrainian. I don’t mind. They’re funny. My wife has a good laugh sometimes.
Hnat makes similar mistakes, sometimes. So, at least I’m not alone in this. And I know it’s natural to mistake these things.
Before reaching to my iPhone, to write this story, I was thinking of programming languages. I know Turbo Pascal very good, very very good. Well, I knew, since that was about 20 years ago last time I used this skill. As an extension of that, I know Delphi quite good. I’m not going to ever utilise that skill. I know C++, not that well, but I like it more. But these days, I’d rather use none of that. I’d prefer more modern and advanced languages, like Rust, Go, or Zig. I’m not afraid of dropping that knowledge. I used it to learn programming, now it’s not needed. Now I can learn other languages, and utilise them. And probably that language taught me a valuable skill of knowing the difference. I do enjoy English quite a lot, and I enjoy it even more when I compare it to that other barbaric language I mentioned.
There are skills we have. And some of them, I guess no need to be afraid losing them. Given we can acquire the new ones.
Let us do that.