I love this question, thank you!
My father was convinced that we would one day move to an English-speaking country. This was back in the 1970s when the USSR seemed unbreakable. But my father was a visionary, so he started to prepare. He mastered English to such perfection that there was never a way to convince Americans he would meet after 1987 that he wasn’t from Texas. I remember there was this conference sometime around 1990 when an American scholar ran towards us across the room, exclaiming, “I had no idea there was going to be another Texan here aside from me!” It took a while to explain to him that my father has never been outside the USSR.
Try to imagine what it means to learn a language with such a degree of fluency in a country where you can’t talk to a native speaker under the penalty of a jail sentence and there’s nowhere you can legally hear the language spoken.
When I was born, my father decided to make things easier for me and teach me from cradle. He only spoke English to me when I was a child, and then he did the same for my sister. Again, imagine the effort of doing that for years, no matter how tired, busy, preoccupied, unwell, etc. Consider that you need to know the names of every household object, which is atrociously hard when you have never been to an English-speaking country and can’t watch TV or read magazines in English.
I learned to read and write in English before any other language. I could do beautiful English cursive by the age of five because we had this old textbook from back in the 1950s, and it paid a lot of attention to English cursive. Also, my father taught me about syntaxis and morphology by age four. Really, he did. We would play this game where he’d write a long sentence in English and I’d analyze its structure and underline different parts of the sentence with different types of lines. We also played lexemes and built trees of word families.
Of course, people didn’t always react positively to hearing another language spoken in their vicinity. My father was denounced to the KGB for speaking “the Jewish language” to a small child. The busybody neighbors had no idea how English sounded and drew their linguistic conclusions on the basis of my father’s distinctively Jewish appearance. But even this danger didn’t stop us.
Nobody would do all this for just any language. English to us meant freedom. It was a door to a different world.
I’d have to talk about other languages in future posts because this will turn into a dissertation otherwise.
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