A flashback almost 6 years ago

It was bitter cold as we stepped outside our apartment building. A strong gust of wind momentarily took my breath away. I looked around. All around me, I could see Russians doing their everyday tasks notwithstanding the -30 degree temperatures. It was as if, this was normal for them. I had only been in the country for 3 months and this extremely cold weather was something I was not used to. I rolled up my scarf and started catching up to my companion Elder Pratt.

We were off to our first appointment of the day. We had been meeting with Nadezhda for a couple weeks now, an older woman living relatively close to us. I was grateful that she kept inviting us to come back after each discussion.

We began our discussion of what would be about Jesus. We were very excited about this discussion as we had prepared most of the morning to get ourselves ready. At least content-wise, we had this discussion down pat. The delivery, though, was another story. Between the two of us, our control of the Russian language was not so firm. Putting up with our Russian, I could tell she was a patient woman. Elder Pratt had only been in the country 5 months.

For the most part, our discussion seemed to be going well. Nadezhda was answering our questions and even asking some questions herself. There were times when she didn't understand what we were saying. Despite Pratt having 2 months of seniority on me, Nadezhda would often look at me and express confusion. I liked to blame his Californian accent as the culprit which prompted me to repeat what he had just said. In the past month of being with him, my knowledge of Russian had grown considerably. I thought back to my previous companion who spoke Russian so confidently and powerfully. I never felt comfortable speaking to Russians around him. I knew that he was analyzing my word choice, counting my grammatical errors. and critiquing my accent. With Pratt, I had become much more fluent just because I had just as good a chance of saying it correctly as he did.

Now it was my turn to talk about the resurrection. I decided to use a little object lesson which involved me representing ourselves as a hand inside of a glove. I found that Russians related well to object lessons that involved familiar items.

I had to give it to myself: I did a pretty good job with teaching that object lesson of mine. As I took off the glove, representing death, and put it back on to represent the coming together of the body and spirit, I felt very confident in my Russian speaking abilities. With such a difficult language as Russian, one could only hope to have a good knowledge with years of experience. But I found that in very specific contexts, even I could communicate effectively.

We finished our discussion and thanked her for the discussion. As we made our way to the marshrutka, Pratt and I talked about how it went, in Russian of course. We stuck to a program that our mission had implemented in which we spoke 100% Russian all the time, even around Americans. It definitely helped out, as frustrating as it could sometimes be. For the most part, we agreed, the discussion had gone over really well. An empty marshrut pulled up and I took the seat by the driver, an easy way to talk to someone. And since the driver couldn't run away from me no matter how bad my Russian was, it was a foolproof idea. I had learned that the best way to learn Russian is through practice with real people. Sure personal study of the language helped solidify concepts, but until I stuck myself out there and used it in real conversation, I knew I was never going to be fluent.

As we made our way into our next area, I thought about all the progress I had made in learning this new language. Sure I had a long ways to go until mastery, but my progress so far gave me confidence that I would continue to improve.