Russian
It happened because I forgot to put the name of my allergy medicine into the nominative case.
“Niksar, otsi miligrami,” I said. Nixar, 20 milligrams.
The pharmacist stared at me blankly. I started to repeat myself, realized my mistake, and self-corrected.
“Niks - Niksar… Niksari”. In Georgian, when you are naming something, you have to add an -i on the end.
“Something something Ruski?” asked the pharmacist, in Russian. I’m assuming the “something something” was “do you speak” or “do you understand”, but I don’t, so…
“Ara,” I responded.
We continued the transaction in Georgian, but with the pharmacist miming her questions to me in an exaggerated fashion, and myself answering in Georgian but without any more novice mistakes. When she asked if I wanted a box of ten or a box of thirty she help up ten fingers to emphasize ten. When she asked if I wanted the adult or child dosage she held her hands apart in a gesture of bigness to indicate adult dosage. I was masked, so she couldn’t see my expression of bemusement, but I chuckled audibly when she mimed an adult, so I think she caught on.
“Saubrob kartulad?” she finally asked. You speak Georgian?
I don’t keep count, but I think she was the third person to try to speak to me in Russian this week alone. This hasn’t happened to me in Tbilisi in years - people are much more used to English speakers in the capital. But in Kutaisi, apparently foreigner still means Russian speaker.
Georgian
Remote instruction started up this week so I’ve spent the week tutoring my son, in Georgian. My wife is a native speaker but I have more experience and expertise teaching children. I’ve been sitting with him at his Zoom meetings and helping him understand and respond to some of the questions. He only really speaks Georgian with his grandmother, and while he went to a Georgian preschool, he’s been in English-only instruction for the last three years, so he doesn’t really have academic Georgian. We want him to be equally fluent in both languages, which was part of our decision to enroll him in a school with Georgian as the language of instruction.
My Georgian is… let’s say, serviceable. I can get the gist, especially of language directed at 8-year-olds. I can conduct tasks like purchasing a box of Nixar for my allergies in an adult dosage. I’ve had to consult with my wife a few times during my son’s lessons to get clarification or help asking the instructor something.
Remote learning has been a blessing and a curse. As a teacher I’ve seen my son’s situation from the other side many times: when you have a kid who struggles to understand the language being used and can’t formulate a response in the target language, the kid will tend to tune out the lesson. This is normal and inevitable: trying to understand a language you don’t know fluently is fatiguing. It’s an enormous strain on working memory and at times it’s impossible to process the language and process the topic of discussion at the same time.
Take mathematics. Suppose I ask you the question “what’s tormeti plus tsameti?” You have to decode tormeti (twelve) and tsameti (thirteen), then get the answer (twenty-five) and then translate the answer back into Georgian (ots-da-khuti). It doesn’t help that Georgian (like French) uses a vigesimal, or base-20, system, meaning that 79 is read as “three-twenties-and-nineteen”. It’s hard even for an adult to do mental translation and mental math at the same time. For an eight-year-old it’s hopelessly daunting. But I’m walking him through the process - teaching him strategies to deal with this, while also having him drill the numbers 1-100 in Georgian to get the encoding/decoding process happening faster.
Then came the word problems. Nona used 10 pieces of paper to make pipkebi. What are pipkebi? I’ve heard the word before but forgotten it. I guess polka dots. It doesn’t matter. The point is for him to visualize a real-world analogue for subtraction. We get through the problem and he handles the subtraction easily. Later I ask my wife. Pipkebi are snowflakes.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, right, paying attention. Ironic. It’s hard to maintain focus when this much demand is being placed on working memory, and so as a result many students who have deficits in their language of instruction tune out. Remote instruction makes this problem a lot worse. So on the one hand, it’s good that I can help him, that I can sit with him and translate, that I can pay attention to what he is and isn’t getting and then give him extra tutoring after school to help him catch up with what he needs to be caught up on. On the other hand, remote instruction makes it harder for his class teacher to see and respond to individual student needs, and, of course, exacerbates the focus problems.
One of the things I noticed is that my son writes very slowly in Georgian. He’ll need to practice in order to keep up with the lessons, especially once he goes to in-person classes and can’t just screenshot the school blackboard and copy it into his notebook later. I sat with him to practice writing Georgian letters quickly and legibly. My wife showed us a letter she wrote to her mother in Georgian when she was our son’s age. Her handwriting was perfect to the point of being superhuman - each letter was formed exactly as in the writing textbooks with machinelike precision. It was like a work of art. The letter was inside a printed envelope with Russian lettering on it - I’m assuming this was a Soviet postal envelope.
After practice, my kids wanted to go outside and meet their friend, who I’ll call Lizi. My wife called her grandmother to see if she could come out. Lizi’s grandmother is visiting from Kazakhstan and her Georgian is a bit weak. After some confusion on the telephone, my wife turned to her mother and asked, in Georgian, how to say “can you let Lizi come out into the yard?” in Russian.
German
My son’s first lesson of the year was German. His school offered us a choice between German and Russian, and we all agreed on German, even though he was studying Russian last year. This was actually a tough call.
Clearly, Russian is useful for getting around Kutaisi and other regions of Georgia outside Tbilisi. We have family in Russia and someday - perhaps after covid vaccines are available for kids - we’d like to visit them there. But Russian is mostly used by older generations of Georgians. Learning Russian is looking backwards, toward a past that Georgia is not altogether comfortable with.
German is aspirational. My wife’s cousin went to Germany for university. She wants our son to do the same. I wouldn’t mind it - I’ve had a lot of students who would go on to study in Germany, or other European countries. German will be a great language to know if Georgia should ever join the EU. In some sense, German in Georgia represents prosperity, education, and a European direction - and is uncommon enough to feel a bit more elite than English.
Perhaps that feeling of associating German with an elite status is also partly because German imports have long been a staple of supermarkets targeting customers who want “foreign” or “European” products. It’s always been easy enough to get imports from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. - they’re on supermarket shelves all over the country - but when I came to Georgia, only the big supermarkets aimed at foreigners and wealthier Georgians stocked German products.
Perhaps ironically I’ve been informed that these elite German brands - like Gut & Günstig - are the German equivalent of the Costco store brand. They’re generics, or cheap downmarket products. This reminds me of how McDonald’s is a lower status option in the US - because it’s ubiquitous and lacks uniqueness, say - but a higher status option in Georgia, because it’s associated with The West.
German products are known in Georgia for their reliability. Often the best (and most expensive) available appliances are Bosch. Finally, German medications have a good reputation here - including my favorite antihistamine, Nixar.
German is also a language in my family and culture - I grew up in a German neighborhood in New York. My father’s grandparents all spoke German - including the ones from Slovenia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time, and where German was the lingua franca, used in academia and government in an empire with 14 officially recognized languages. My parents thought it was just wunderbar (wonderful) that their grandkids would be learning German.
The German lessons have been extremely easy, since they’ve been focusing on the alphabet, which of course uses the regular Latin character set that my son is already familiar with. There are of course tons of cognate words, although I’ve been made to understand that German grammar can be a bit challenging. Perhaps if remote instruction continues through the year I’ll learn German myself.
Turkish
Once on a flight to Georgia, I fell into conversation with a stranger at an airport bar in Istanbul:
…this girl was trying to elicit, from the bartender, shots of something distinctively Turkish. He was offering her Turkish vodka, but she was (quite sensibly) not impressed and wanted something more authentic and cultural than vodka. Of course I immediately thought of rakı, Turkey’s national beverage. It’s almost exactly like Sambuca, and comparable to Ouzo, Absinthe, and various other anise-flavored liquors and liqueurs. In other words, totally delicious.
I suggested that we try rakı, but the bartender, and the waiter who had now also gotten involved in this conversation, did not understand what I was asking. I tried three times and the bartender apparently either thought I was asking for vodka or really wanted to push vodka that day, and then I decided that maybe speaking Turkish would resolve the situation, so I put together one of my first Turkish sentences ever: “Rakı var mı?” It means, “Is there any Rakı?”
This got their attention. The waiter and bartender immediately understood me and knew what I wanted. The waiter even repeated the question in case the bartender hadn’t heard me, and he said it basically exactly the same way I said it (although to a trained ear, probably not. As I said, Turkish vowels are really challenging for me, and my brain just isn’t wired to hear differences that Turkish native speakers can hear in vowel sounds. So the waiter may well have been repeating me in a non-foreigner accent. The point is, I got my point across.)
After that, my store of Turkish was basically exhausted (I’d already used “good day” and “thank you” on the flight from Istanbul to New York in December) and so I confirmed several times in English that we did indeed want to have two shots of Rakı despite its strength and the fact that you’re supposed to put water in it and sip it like a civilized human being, not shoot three ounces of it in one go like some savage American beast.
What’s interesting to me about this story is that asking about rakı in English produced only confusion - after all, there’s nothing an English speaker would be saying that sounds like “rakı” - but asking in Turkish produced instant comprehension. There’s so much that goes into successful communication - more than just the words we use, it’s also about the words the listener is listening for.
Anyway, my son is also studying Turkish. His school used to be associated with the Demireli school system in Georgia, which was itself loosely associated with the Gülen movement. This used to be fine for everyone - these schools were typically of very high quality and reputation both in Georgia and internationally, and it seems that several of the Georgians that I know and hold in high regard went to Demireli schools. In fact, the trivia team that sometimes beats my trivia team at pub quiz is named “Okul Defteri”, which is Turkish for “school notebook”, and I think I recall one of the team members saying he went to a Demireli school.
However, the Turkish government has had a falling out with the Gülen movement over the last decade, resulting in Fethullah Gülen becoming persona non grata and the government designating the Gülen movement a terrorist organization. Turkey has sought to reduce Gülen’s influence around the world by going after Gülen schools with all of the soft power tools at their disposal. Georgia has not escaped this process, apparently finding legal and regulatory pretenses to go after the Demireli schools at the behest of the Turkish regime. Some of the Demireli-affiliated schools have cut off their affiliation and reconstituted under new official ownership but with essentially the same learning program in place.
My son’s school offers Turkish in addition to Georgian, English, and the choice of German or Russian, which means that third graders study four languages at once. I am enthused about this because getting my kids familiar with a variety of languages - with different phonological inventories, approaches to grammar, etc. - during the “critical period” will set them up to be successful multilingual citizens of the world. Unlike their dad, who, after eleven years in a country, still makes basic grammatical errors that inspire pharmacists to mime words at him.
The Turkish teacher is actually Turkish, and speaks Georgian with a distinct Turkish accent, which makes me feel less alone as a foreigner in Kutaisi with a weird accent. Her Georgian may well be better than mine - have I told you about the time I did a visa run to Kemalpaşa, a town just on the Turkish side of the Georgian border, and met a bunch of trilingual Russian-Georgian-Turkish shopkeepers? Everyone I met in Kemalpaşa spoke Georgian and pretty much no one spoke English - it was the first time I had to spend an entire day actually communicating exclusively in Georgian with nothing else to fall back on, and as I said, ironically I had to leave Georgia to have that experience.
English
I haven’t actually taught English in years - my last eight years of teaching were mostly teaching MYP Design (previously known as Technology), along with a smattering of other subjects - Drama, Individuals and Societies, and DP Global Politics - as needed at my schools. But when I sat down with my son for his first English lesson of the year, all the memories came rushing back to me.
English is his dominant language by far - thanks to input from me, from his classmates over the last three years, and, most importantly, from Minecraft streamers on YouTube and Twitch. I can even hear it in his accent and speech patterns. He never quite had my New York accent - he started off with vaguely Georgian-accented speech, and after going to school this drifted towards a general international English accent. His three teachers have been from the UK, US, and South Africa, and his classmates have mostly been been from Russia, Georgia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, and the result was a version of English perhaps most notable for lacking any particularly distinct regional features. If you’d met him a year ago you might have guessed he was from California.
But now he’s taken on speech patterns particular to the gaming subculture. I might try to write up a distinctive inventory of the features I’m thinking of, but off the top of my head I’d say he has a “gaming register” that I would describe as sounding tonally sarcastic, slightly exaggerated speech patterns (e.g. a greater dynamic range, more enunciation of vowels) well adapted for announcing what you’re doing while you play, and for some reason what sound to me like emphatically aspirated consonants. I feel like if you heard him speak in this YouTuber register you’d know what I meant immediately.
He’s also developing some awareness of when and how to deliberately use each register - he’s noticed that I am more likely to be entertained by gaming register than his mom, so he seems to use it on me more often. And then I put him into a class with kids who are learning how to read “Sam is looking at a ship”, except instead of “ship” everyone says “sheep” because no one ever teaches them how to make the “short i” sound.
The upside is that the class is conducted mainly in Georgian, and they are using a lot of text and translation, and both of those things can help my son improve his academic Georgian. A lot of the Georgian I know was learned from observing my co-teachers teaching English during my first three years in the country.
I have mixed feelings about the text and translation method, though, because it seems to result the calcification of what I call “Georgian English” - a collection of features related to the fact that many Georgians learn English from Georgian teachers in Georgian with little if any reference to authentic English materials. One of these is difficulty with English phonemes - mostly vowels, because while Georgian vowels each make one distinct sound (maybe 2 with r-coloring, but that’s controversial), English vowels can make 3 or 4 or 5 sounds each depending on dialect. I think New York English has about 23 vowel sounds altogether. Another is the use of direct translation in words and phrases where this produces something wrong or nonsensical in English - for example, the common Georgian construction “I am going in America”, a result of Georgian students being taught to translate “-shi” as “in” rather than as “in” or “to” or “at” depending on the circumstance. Again, this is because English prepositions are actually deceptively complicated and to explain our intuitions about how these are used would take thousands of words and more thought than most native speakers will put into prepositions in their entire lifetimes.
English as a foreign language instruction is full of little things like this - another example is that students are made to memorize lists of the order that English adjectives are allowed to come in. You’ll notice that “a little green flower” sounds right but “a green little flower” sounds wrong, but you’ve probably never thought about it before; EFL students are explicitly taught that color has to come before size. Here are ten adjective categories - go ahead and see if you can memorize the list!
If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is
Did I say five languages? How could I forget about Korean? How could I forget Gangnam Style being played in the halls of the public school where I taught in Kutaisi during the five-minute breaks between classes?
And now my own kids are blossoming K-pop fans. My son likes Dynamite, by BTS, and is warming on Butter. My daughter prefers Blackpink - especially Ice Cream and Boombayah. None of us speak Korean or have any immediate plans to learn it - although I did learn the writing system, Hangul, back when I thought I might teach English there rather than here. That hasn’t stopped us from putting LALISA on heavy rotation in our apartment for the last several days. The globalization of K-pop - and anime before it - show that media in any language has a shot of gaining major currency in world culture. The internet brings these media to anyone, anywhere.
I grew up in the most linguistically diverse city on the planet, speaking only one language. It wasn’t until university that I really started to develop an appreciation for languages and linguistics. Now I’m awash in languages, to the point where I might encounter half a dozen on a daily basis. It’s endlessly fascinating. I never stop learning things. I guess I just wanted to say - in the words of Kurt Vonnegut - “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”