Category: current events

On learning Ukrainian before Russian, and the politics of foreign language study

Regular readers will know that language learning is one of my lifelong pursuits and hobbies.

I’ve received some emails of late about the prospect of learning Ukrainian. Do I plan to study it? Should you be studying it?

First, the obvious disclaimers. If you’re learning Ukrainian for reasons of love, or heritage, or a desire to move to Kharkiv at some point in the future, then by all means learn Ukrainian.

And if you just really like the idea of learning Ukrainian, that’s okay, too. But if you’re reading this (or asking me about it), you probably have a more practical turn of mind.

Ukrainian has a base of about 27 million speakers. Numerically, that places it on the same level as Thai, Tagalog, or Dutch. Ukrainian isn’t Latvian (1.5 million speakers). But it isn’t Spanish, French, or Russian, either.

Speaking of Russian: Most Ukrainian speakers also speak Russian—for now, at least. Prior to the current conflict, many Ukrainians used Russian as their language of daily life, a remnant of Soviet times.

There is an active campaign within Ukraine to extirpate the Russian language and replace it with Ukrainian. The outcome of those efforts will likely hinge on the outcome of the war. 

But what about you, an English-speaker who (presumably) wants to learn a Slavic language? Going by the numbers, Russian—with 258 million speakers worldwide—makes a lot more sense.

Not all of those speakers are in Russia. I recently met a young woman from Uzbekistan. Her English was minimal, but she spoke fluent Russian. (Uzbekistan is a former Soviet Republic.)

Another consideration is the availability of learning materials. Russian language pedagogy in the West goes back decades. When I was a college student in the 1980s, you could find textbooks and cassette courses to help you learn Russian. Every major language learning app (Pimsleur, Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, etc.) has developed Russian language learning materials in considerable depth and breadth.

Ukrainian, on the other hand, was an almost-never-studied language in the West until 2022. That too, may change. But such a change will take years.

I have the impression that some language learners in the West are choosing Ukrainian over Russian as a self-congratulatory political statement. Kind of like putting the Ukrainian flag on your social media profile.

Once again: you be you. As for me, though: “Russia” has been many things in my lifetime. When I was a kid, Russia was the center of the USSR. Then it was Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Now it’s Putin’s Russia.

In ten years, Russia will probably be something else. But my guess is: there will still be more Russian speakers than speakers of any other Slavic language. (Even Polish only has 41 million speakers.)

I’ve lived long enough to have learned that while politics change, languages don’t. (At least, they don’t change that much within any human lifespan.)

If I were going to learn a Middle Eastern language, I would pick Arabic (373 million speakers) over Hebrew (9 million speakers). This has nothing to do with my feelings about the Arab-Israeli conflict, which—like Russia—has changed significantly within my lifetime. I would pick Arabic because Arabic is spoken in at least twenty countries, while Modern Hebrew is spoken in only one.

After I learned Arabic, then I might take on Hebrew. I have nothing against Hebrew, mind you. But when approaching a language family, I say: all things being equal, learn the major ones first. Spanish before Italian. Mandarin before Cantonese. German before Norwegian, Swedish, or Dutch.

And yes, Russian before Ukrainian, without strong motivating factors to the contrary. You won’t be drafted into the Russian Army as a result. I promise.

-ET

**Quick link to Ukrainian language-learning resources on Amazon**

**Quick link to Russian language-learning resources on Amazon**

Margaret MacLeod and the challenge of Hindi

The language situation in India is complicated. Indians speak many different languages and dialects. Imagine driving from one state to another, and the language being different. That’s the way it often is in India, depending on where you are.

India has 22 official languages. One of these is English, that being a remnant of India’s years as the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. English is usually sufficient if you only want to communicate with the Indian programmers in your company’s IT department. Beware, however. According to India’s 2011 census, only 10 percent of the Indian population claims to speak English, and almost all of these speak English as a second language, with varying degrees of fluency.

Major languages in India include Punjabi, Tamil, and Gujarati. But if you’re going to learn an indigenous Indian language, Hindi is definitely the one to start with. 57 percent of India speaks Hindi. 43 percent of Indians claim Hindi as their native language. No other Indian language really comes close in raw percentages.

As some of you may know, foreign languages are one of my hobbies and passions. For many years, I used several languages in my corporate work.

Almost all languages interest me, to one degree or another, but I don’t dare attempt to take on all of them. Some I actively avoid, because they’re difficult and the numerical incentives simply aren’t there.

Take Finnish, for example. Finnish is a very challenging language for native English speakers to learn, and no one really speaks it outside of Finland, a country with a population roughly equivalent to that of Wisconsin.

Spanish makes a lot more sense. Spanish is much easier, and is spoken in 20 different countries around the world, with 475 million native speakers.

Hindi is a major language, even though it’s only spoken in India. But Hindi is not an easy language. And until recently, there weren’t many resources for learning it.

Some Americans are rising to the challenge, nonetheless. Margaret MacLeod, a US State Department official, speaks Hindi and has recently become something of a sensation in the Indian media.

According to her State Department biography, MacLeod speaks and reads both Hindi and Urdu. Since I don’t speak Hindi, I can’t personally assess her skill level. But she seems to be fluent, as she fields questions from Indian government officials and journalists with visible ease. Indian commenters in the YouTube videos in which she appears give her high marks, too. I’m therefore willing to assume that she knows Hindi very well.

Yet further evidence that mastery of a foreign language is neither impractical nor infeasible just because one’s native language is English.

-ET

**Hindi learning resources on Amazon**

Kristen Clarke, Harvard, and “race science”

Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.  At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.

Clarke based her letter on…race science.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

 

Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.

Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.

Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.

Kristen Clarke

Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)

This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.

This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.

Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.

What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.

We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.

I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.

I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.

Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.

Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.

-ET