Mother Tongue: Fortunately, there is YouTube
I wrote this story before this week’s terrible news erupted in my country. It feels a little schizophrenic to publish it now because who cares about languages when stuff like that happens. But then I have felt somewhat schizophrenic for most of the past 11 months so that’s not entirely new.
So here goes.
"Mama, can you teach me how to speak Russian properly?"
We were descending the 250 steps from our hill to the city center when Maya asked me this question, and my jaw nearly dropped onto the stone steps at these words. Only a few months ago she said "I want to lose this language!" and I was prohibited from uttering a single word in it within earshot of other mammals.
"Ok…" I said, trying to retain my composure, "Do you want us to speak Russian more?"
I planned to start speaking Russian to her at home a few days a week, but I didn’t follow through. We still read books in Russian, but that’s about it. Maybe this was my second chance.
But that’s not what she meant.
"No,” she says. “You will tell me to say a word in Russian and then teach me how to say it correctly.”
Specifically, she wanted to learn how to pronounce the Russian "r" in the word "Vera". And the soft "n" in "Anya" and in "Manyusha."
"Manyusha"(Манюша) is what I call Maya. And "Vera" and "Anya" are the names of two Russian girls featured prominently on Manyusha's new favorite YouTube channel.
Somehow, YouTube (God bless it) must have read my thoughts and recommended Maya this channel, where Russian circus group kids do all sorts of things that Manyusha does in her acrobatics class, only they speak Russian while doing so.
And now she wants to be able to say their names properly.
We start with the rolling Russian ‘r’.
In reality, this sound is difficult even for kids born and raised in Russia, and many a Russian child has been sent to work with a speech therapist to work on their subpar ‘r’s.
Some never get it fixed. Actually, in Russia, pronouncing the ‘r’ at the back of your mouth (like in Yiddish, Hebrew, and French) instead of near your teeth is associated with Jews. Maybe it's because Jewish kids often grew up hearing their grandparents speak Yiddish.
This is how most Russian-speaking kids in Israel pronounce it as well and it’s totally fine.
But it turns out that for my kids it’s a rite of passage to be able to pronounce this sound the proper way. At one point, Yannai too, when he was about the same age as his sister is now, decided that he couldn’t move on in life until he improved his Russian ‘r’.
This sound (officially called an “alveolar trill”) is pronounced by placing your tongue behind your upper teeth and directing the airflow in such a way that it makes your tongue vibrate and touch the alveolar ridge (the hard ridge right behind your upper teeth) very quickly multiple times, creating a ‘trill’.
The closest sound in American English is the consonant in the middle of the word butter and ladder, or most words where t or d appear between two vowels, the first one of which is stressed. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that you don’t say ‘t’ and ‘d’ in these words. Instead, the tip of your tongue quickly taps the alveolar ridge. The main difference between this sound (called “alveolar tap”) and the Russian alveolar trill is that in the former you only tap the alveolar ridge once, but in the latter, your tongue taps it repeatedly as it vibrates.
Spanish has both these sounds. The word pero ‘but’ is pronounced with an alveolar tap (like in butter) and perro ‘dog’ is pronounced with the alveolar trill (like the Russian ‘r’).
But since Russian, unlike Spanish, doesn’t have a contrast between these two, it’s totally fine to substitute one for the other. That is, you could live your whole life somewhere in Tomsk (wherever that is), quietly tapping your alveolar ridge instead of rolling your r’s and nobody would notice.1
After I explain the mechanics behind the articulation of these sounds to my daughter (not really 🙄), I tell her to say ‘butter’ a few times. Then we move on to saying ‘Vera’ where, like in butter, this sound is located between a stressed and an unstressed vowel.
Then it’s just a matter of training yourself to pronounce this sound in different environments, which feels less natural to English speakers. We say Grisha (her uncle’s name), Re’em (her friend’s name), krasnyi (red), and marozhenaye (‘ice cream’).
She aces it.
The soft ‘n’ in ‘Anya’ is harder.
Russian consonants have a ‘hard’ and a ‘soft’ variant. The ‘hard’ variants of t, n, z and s are pronounced by placing the tip of your tongue right behind your teeth, much like in English. The soft or ‘palatalized’ variants are pronounced by raising more of your tongue (in the case of n the whole tongue) to the hard palate, i.e. the roof of your mouth right above your tongue.
This is where she is lucky to have a linguist for a mother. Usually, it is preferable to have a nurse- or a doctor mom, (or maybe, in our case, a mom who owns a trampoline park), but not when you try to fix your soft Russian consonants. Because if I weren’t a linguist (*beats her chest*) I wouldn’t be able to help her with that.
That’s because the Russian spelling is misleading: the hard and soft variants of consonants are spelled the same. Anya and Ana (spelled Аня vs Ана) are two different names, the first one pronounced with a soft ‘n’ and the second one with a hard ‘n,’ but as you see, in spelling, the consonants look the same but the vowels letters are different.
So an untrained native Russian speaker would likely not be able to explain the difference between these words. Here is a good example of why native speakers without special training usually cannot explain what is happening in their language and why. It's not enough to have a liver to be a liver surgeon (*beats her chest again*)
No matter how she tries, Maya can't get it right. Or, rather she can’t get it right according to her very high standards.
Pronunciation is tricky. In linguistics, there is something called a “critical period hypothesis", i.e. the assumption that there is a cut-off age after which a person cannot reach native-like fluency in a language.2 It is debated when exactly that cut-off period is (some say it can be as late as the teenage years) but the general agreement is that the cut-off age for the acquisition of phonology (aka the correct pronunciation) is much earlier than say, the acquisition of sentence structure.
By the way, it doesn’t mean that after that a person cannot learn to speak a language without an accent, it just means that it will be much harder for them, and even if they do, they won’t be doing it using the same neural/ cognitive processes as native speakers, but would rather be ‘faking it.’
I try to explain to Maya that it doesn’t matter if her ‘n’ is not soft enough because it really doesn’t. She has a bit of an accent and that’s fine.
The only reason I’m playing this pronunciation game is because I’m thrilled she wants to engage with the language at all and I want to support it.
But nothing helps. She’s obsessed now with getting it right like those Veras and Anya’s on her new favorite YouTube channel.
I’ve long shut up but she keeps repeating, “Man-yusha… Ma-ni-usha… An-ya… No that wasn’t good… Ani-ya… No that wasn't good…" Like she says after every less-than-perfect side aerial.
I wonder where she gets her perfectionism from.
They wouldn’t notice because they’d be drunk most of the time but whatever. That being said, if you pronounced it at the back of your mouth, the Yiddish way, they would notice, particularly if your last name was “Rabinovich.”
When I say “native-like fluency” I mean where the language lives in your brain, not how well you can function in it. For all practical purposes, I have a native-like fluency in English and Hebrew, but these languages have a different status in my brain than Russian. That is, when I’m a 99-year-old with Alzheimer’s, I will probably forget all these languages I know or am learning but not Russian.
She can *hear* the difference, and that’s an important step.
Again, I love this! Such magical moments you capture so thoughtfully and so well.