Thursday, January 6 :: Russian email

One of my colleagues has recently met someone who is a native speaker of a language other than English. I know you are asking yourself, "Can this be possible? Someone who does not speak English natively?" Well, on very rare occasions, it can happen.
At any rate, my colleague is very excited about it. He plans to take advantage of this chance meeting by learning his new friend's language by communicating through email. It's a very good idea. I suggested to him that he should write in English and his friend should write in respective native language. In this way you see the foreign language as it should be. I believe that he is not taking my well-intentioned advice because he plans to try to write in his second language and accompany it with the English translation.

Translation is not the goal of second language acquisition. Fluency is the goal. Fluency means comprehension without translation.

So, if he would not take my (educated) advice, then I decided that I should take it myself. Therefore I have set up a new email account from a Russian mail server. This way, I have to learn how to navigate a web-based email account in Russian. Just to set up the account with my username, password, mother's maiden name, birthday, etc. was much more difficult than I had imagined it would be! I will use my new Russian email account for this blog. One of the first things that I have learned from this experience is what the OK and Cancel buttons look like in Russian:

And here is Current Password: Текущий пароль

I also have a friend who is a native speaker of Russian, so I will ask her to write me a few lines in Russian so that I can learn some email-speak in Russian.