The Foreign Service Journal, October 2011

I had heard so much about. Inessa agreed that structure was necessary to learn a language and whipped out the four or five textbooks we would draw lessons from, albeit not in any particular order. I fretted. But, bowing to her experience, I went along with her proposal — though it didn’t seem like much of a plan. But I soon discovered that she was far more clever than I. For the next few weeks, Inessa did most of the talking — in Russian. She did all of the talking, as a matter of fact, which I chalked up to an older woman’s need to tell rambling stories. Poor thing, I thought; she must be lonely. She told me all about her cat, her dog, her family members and her illnesses, and I listened — for weeks. Just about the time I was thinking that I was going to have to find a teacher that let me get a word in edge- wise, something amazing happened. While attempting to explain one day, in my terrible Russian, to a non-English- speaking driver that I had sent the motor pool the schedule for the day— or thought I had, anyway — I acciden- tally used the right case ending for a word I didn’t realize I knew! It then dawned on me that perhaps all that talking she had done had been deliberate; there was a plan, and it was working! She had been giving me the sound of the language and slowly en- abling me to hear the individual words used in the right forms. I had been passively learning! When I asked her about it the next day, she just grinned, eyes twinkling. I still struggled, however, and les- sons still exhausted me. I’m sure my colleagues grew tired of me whining “Ugghhh … time for language,” day after day after day. It was a slow tor- ture, akin to having toothpicks shoved under one’s fingernails, and every fiber of my being resisted it. Inessa was as challenging as I had anticipated. Her justifiable frustration with my tragically short memory often left me with a quivering bottom lip. What I lacked in talent, I tried to make up for in resolve, spending countless hours at home and at work reviewing O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 My second teacher, Inessa, floated into my disordered language life much as Maria floated into the Von Trapp children’s — but without the singing.