I’m Benjamin, the new Russian editor of this year’s Linguist.  This will be my second year at UoB studying Russian, French and Japanese with potentially two extra hours of Arabic a week – not everyone’s first pick for a degree but I honestly couldn’t imagine anything better than getting to study languages full-time. 

The fact that I get so excited about learning languages is pretty funny since I hated them in secondary school and ditched Spanish at the first chance I got.  The joke’s on me now since my girlfriend is Colombian/Chilean and half her family speak it…  Though this is a very compelling reason to pick up a language, the thing that really sparked my love for languages was when I got to live in Russia and Ukraine for two years as a volunteer for my church. 

As a volunteer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, your job is to teach people about God and find ways to help and serve anyone you can.  This is pretty tricky if you can’t speak with anybody so a big part of our time was dedicated to studying and speaking the language as much as possible.  Since we were surrounded by native speakers this sounds as though it should have been easy, and for three weeks after I arrived in Vladivostok in far East Asia, it was – until lockdown started.  Even though a lot of my time there was spent sitting in an apartment, that didn’t stop me from having the true Russian experience: visiting babushki in their flats to eat borscht; almost getting shot and living through a -40-degree winter in Siberia where the icicles are almost twice your height and your eyelashes freeze after being outside for 15 minutes. 

That winter, a unique attraction appeared in the city centre of Novosibirsk near the river: a theme park made entirely out of ice.  Impressive sculptures littered the grounds, and the whole area was covered with huge slides carved out of solid ice that whizzed you away after you sat down at the top on a tiny piece of plastic.  Круто. 

In Ukraine, life was no less eventful, with things like fending off packs of wild dogs on the way to the shop and patriotic holidays with street parades being a regular occurrence.  Something I learned during my time there was that the way to people’s hearts, no matter their nationality, is to learn their language and the things they love.  I learned to love both – from the colourful swearing dialect of ‘mat’ to the ornamented Orthodox churches and shawarma stands on every street corner.  Watching the folk tales and old kid’s cartoons helped me understand and appreciate what has made people who speak Russian who they are today, just as much as anything on CBBC I’ve watched or teenage novels I’ve read has become a part of me.

Reading in Russian has given me a new appreciation for the language, and being already 3 books deep into Harry Potter it’s as if I’m reading it again for the first time. The way that meaning can be expressed through the language is beautiful and it’s no wonder that writers like Dostoyevsky have achieved international acclaim with the way they convey emotion and feeling through the nuances the Russian tongue has to offer.

I’m grateful for my service and time in both of these beautiful countries, I love them and their wonderful people.  I hope to show you that in every article we publish about them this year!

Benjamin Turner