After: Любовь к языкам
Foreign languages have been one of my primary interests since I was a kid. My family and I lived in Ukraine, and I dreamt about learning Ukrainian, looking forward to the day I would have to learn it in school. I was set to start learning Ukrainian in school once I reached second grade, but we moved to Russia, when I was seven, so I didn’t get the chance to get to know my mother-tongue (by the way, literally “mother”, because my mom’s a Ukrainian).
Later on, I was keen on German. At first I learned it by myself, then in school. My first German teacher was German indeed — Emma Schiemann. I’ve kept her lessons in my mind to this very day. While attending the Aircraft Institute, I completed a course as a translator of technical literature from German and English.
As for English, I tried to study it in school, also on my own, but the effectiveness of learning phonetics and pronunciation by a self-taught book is questionable, to say the least. All the same, I filed an application to be admitted to the advanced course, not the beginner’s. I had to plough my way through the first few months, it goes without saying, but later, when I was a student at Moscow State University, I was able to help my fellow classmates to do their homework.
At Moscow University I studied French. At the same time I attended cross-department magistracy as a translator from German, English, and French. But the more I came to know about French culture and mentality the less desire I had to continue. Our professor, she was magnificent (I was lucky with that at least as much as with German), but I had absolutely no rapport with the French language.
Later on, I encountered a booklet with the basics of Arabic. This was a miracle. Not the booklet (at the time I couldn’t judge if it’s good or bad), but those… traceries? letters? (Now I know they are huruf.) I and a friend of mine went to a mosque, asking to be admitted to a group for studying Arabic (free of charge). All groups were full. But I couldn’t help myself. I bought a primer, then a copy of the Quran with parallel texts and started learning. Eventually I became a Muslim.
