Well, as you can see by the title, maybe it's not so simple. Kim and I spent an hour and a half with the students at the U yesterday (and we leave in 45 minutes for another two hour class session) and we were able to hear that most common of errors that Russians and Ukrainians make, the classic 'vanishing article'.
This tendency that these speakers have, and probably all other speakers of Slavic-based langauges, makes their English sound primitive by just leaving out 'the' and 'a'.
It was a good reminder: there are no easy languages, only more and less gifted learners.
The whole 'less gifted' thing was driven home with gleeful enthusiasm by those same students when they turned the tables and started to teach us Ukrainian. We easily crossed the line from 'experts' just because we happened to have been born in English-speaking America, to 'dumb foreigners' just because we happened to be living in Kiev.
Oh, well. It was a good experience and we're happy for the chance to teach and learn and to get to know a lot more people all at the same time.
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My brain automatically slipped the article into the title... I had to search for several seconds before I finally realized the "a" was missing!
Our Son is learning Russian right now in hopes of becoming a "worship missionary" there. He laughs at me every time I try a word. Wish I would have learned more languages as a child.
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