Course Evaluation Time!

[philena]

Let us leave aside the most maddening questions about "the goals of the course." Let us instead talk about the following:

This course provided me with useful skills: Disagree 1 2 3 4 5 Agree

My comments in syntax: " 'Useful skills.' Ha ha ha*." Resounding appreciative belly laugh from fellow students. My comments in Phonetics: " 'Useful skills.' Ha ha ha***." Resounding appreciative belly laugh from fellow students. My comments in Slavic Linguistics: " 'Useful skills' Ha ha ha**." Resounding appreciative belly laugh from fellow students. Then the professor responded (Yes yes, he wasn't supposed to be there) "Hey! I once reconstructed the word for horseradish in Polish, knowing only the Russian form and the historical sound changes from Late Common Slavic ancestor to the Polish form." I don't know if he was serious, and I wonder whether that really counts as a useful skill if he was. It's nice that he was able to defend himself, though.



*Insert ironic laugh here.
** Here too.
*** And here.

Comments

sorry for off-top

[anti-neutrino.livejournal.com]

I was looking through your interests and was really surprised with Чапаев. Are you really interested in Иван Васильевич? Why?

Re: sorry for off-top

[philena.livejournal.com]

More with the movie than with the acutal dude, but yeah. My third-year Russian class spent the entire last quarter focusing the Чапаевский миф in Russian culture, complete with slightly off-color jokes, that fabulous movie from 1934, and the book Чапаев и Пустота by Victor Pelevin. The movie in particular was what hooked me (and I had a devil of a time finding it to own a copy), but it's a nice little bit of culture to have up my sleeve in general.

Re: sorry for off-top

[anti-neutrino.livejournal.com]

he-he, I mistakingly named Чапаев as Иван Васильевич. Sorry, of course he is Василий Иванович... Иван Васильевич is just another mythological figure in Russian history - Ivan the Terrible.

Is the book worth reading? There was a lot of fuss about it here, but I am not that interested in modern Russian literature. Would you recommend it?

Re: sorry for off-top

[philena.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. It's the kind of thing that was interesting to discuss in class, particularly if you have the right sort of professor, but it is very, very modern in flavor. Arnold Shwartzeneggor makes an appearence, for example, and there are a few bizarre dream sequences. (And one kind of cool one.) I don't know if I'd say that I liked it, though, and it's definitely not like your standard Russian classics. If you like Chapaev, it's cetainly worth reading, but if experimental fiction sets your teeth on edge, I'd give it a miss. For what it's worth, though, the book is well-written and ingenious, whatever your attitude is towards its genre.