English I. Years ago, I think it was 2010, after landing at the San Francisco airport, I took a cab to Santa Cruz. As we got close to our destination, the taxi driver started talking on the phone in fluent Russian. Intrigued, I asked him if he was Russian—from his looks, he did not appear to be—and he replied that he was not Russian, but that he had a Russian ex-wife, with whom he was talking on the phone. I then asked him how he had learned to speak Russian so well—Slavic languages are notoriously hostile to non-Slavs—and he told me that he had studied it for months or perhaps years. If I am not mistaken, he said he had studied at the U.S. Department of Defense's Foreign Language Center in Monterey, a town less than an hour's drive from Santa Cruz: "By studying eight hours a day for months, you can learn a lot," he concluded.
Taxi driver
Taxi driver
Taxi driver
English I. Years ago, I think it was 2010, after landing at the San Francisco airport, I took a cab to Santa Cruz. As we got close to our destination, the taxi driver started talking on the phone in fluent Russian. Intrigued, I asked him if he was Russian—from his looks, he did not appear to be—and he replied that he was not Russian, but that he had a Russian ex-wife, with whom he was talking on the phone. I then asked him how he had learned to speak Russian so well—Slavic languages are notoriously hostile to non-Slavs—and he told me that he had studied it for months or perhaps years. If I am not mistaken, he said he had studied at the U.S. Department of Defense's Foreign Language Center in Monterey, a town less than an hour's drive from Santa Cruz: "By studying eight hours a day for months, you can learn a lot," he concluded.