I got a rude awakening the other week: My Russian is in terrible shape.

Full disclosure: It was never in great shape to begin with. It's the last of the five foreign languages I have learned, and when I learned it, I focused on a very narrow vocabulary. Basically just what I needed to communicate with a small child and the people who cared for him.

But my minister wanted to try something new for Pentecost, so she asked several members of the congregation to read the same passage, each in a different language. I got... more

I can't decide which was harder to learn, Japanese or Russian. Japanese starts out easy, then throws you grammatical curves worse than anything Hideki Irabu or Kei Igawa deliver from the mound. Russian gave me the grammar willies from the start, thanks perhaps to my friend Leslie's rapid primer on cases and declensions. Russia's alphabet lures the eye because it looks so much like ours, only to trip you up on the "P"s that get pronounced like "R"s. Japanese has three alphabets, and one of them is more than 1,000 characters long.

OK, I'm a language... more