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To Russia, With Love: CSUN Students Dive into Language, Culture

If a language is the gateway to the soul of a people, the 12 students in the inaugural Russian Strategic Language Immersion Program at Cal State Northridge this summer discovered an amazing gateway to Pushkin, the balalaika, Solzhenitsyn and the complex Russian culture.

The dozen are among the first wave of students in the national Strategic Language Initiative (SLI), developed by the federal government in response to a post-9/11 plea from the U.S. Departments of Defense and State for linguists who can fill the nation’s critical need for expertise in the languages spoken in global “hot spots.” CSUN offers the Russian component in an SLI-funded California State University consortium that offers free intensive language learning in Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi and Korean.

Student Andrew Corral, in a Russian studies class, found the immersion experience "intense."

For six weeks, students in the Northridge program-most are CSUN undergrads but a few hail from Pasadena City College, Cal State Long Beach and UC Santa Barbara-literally lived, breathed and dreamed in Russian. They took a pledge, said Northridge immersion program director Dina Mokhnatkin, to speak the language exclusively “in class, dorms-everywhere-just as if they were in Russia.”

The summer language immersion segment of the program ended July 25 with a campus celebration full of Russian folk music, dance, food and song, but Mokhnatkin is on the lookout for Russian-speaking CSUN faculty who can work with the students throughout the academic year.

“We want to connect each student with a Russian-speaking faculty or community person who can advise them, work with them online or meet with them once a month until the end of the school year, in the student’s major,” said Mokhnatkin, herself a graduate of Leningrad State University in St. Petersburg. A business major, for example, might be paired with a business professor or a community entrepreneur. Together, speaking and working in Russian, they would build a business project during the course of the year.

The idea, she said, is for students to reach the level of fluency required for future work in Russia, with busi­nesses, science programs or other entities.

The program includes a six-week study sojourn in Russia during summer 2009, said assistant program director Helen Heinrich, also the Oviatt Library cataloguing coordinator.

The summer program’s heavy regimen included Russian grammar, reading and writing, communication skills, Russian contemporary life studies, Russian cuisine and field trips to observe Russian life in Los Angeles. Heinrich’s information literacy background added valuable bilingual information-retrieval skills to the program, whose rich spectrum of offerings presented both rewards and challenges.

Linguistics major Sarah Caine seeks a career as a United Nations interpreter.

Sarah Caine, a linguistics major who transferred to CSUN from the University of Arizona, saw the program as an invaluable springboard to a career as a United Nations interpreter, as a diplomat or in politics. The trip to Russia was an added enticement for the senior, whose family on her father’s side fled Belarus in the 1920s.

With two semesters of Russian studies behind her, Caine was no novice, but the level of Russian required for the program-intermediate or advanced-proved daunting at first. Even daily conversation could be frustrating. She began to nurture a “real empathy for people who come here and don’t know the language.”

But within a couple of weeks, Caine “got into the rhythm.”

Frank Telles, who teaches physical sciences and geology at CSUN, signed up for the program after hearing about it from a fellow member of the Slavic Baptist Church in Hollywood. The intensive immersion segment appealed to him, as did the one-on-one interaction with program lecturers such as Stanislav Shvabrin of Princeton, Oleg Minin of USC’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and guest speaker Eugenia Khorosheva, a Caltech molecular biologist.

Frank Telles scans notes in a class that polished his Russian language skills.

Part Native American, part Salvadoran, Telles had absorbed the colloquialisms of the “street Russian” he heard growing up in the Russian sectors of West Hollywood. He figured that learning proper Russian grammar from the ground up would prove essential for his short-term goal: to conduct missionary work in Russia.

Andrew Corral of Winnetka, a senior majoring in classical applied mathematics, is thrilled that his Russian language skills improved “drastically” during the immersion program. He now feels comfortable conversing in Russian, and intends to continue Russian studies this year “to keep up with what I’ve learned.”

The program’s rewards far out­weighed its challenges, which included “a workload that left very little time for sleep.” Corral describes the six weeks as “more intense than anything I’d ever done…At times I didn’t know how I would find the strength to continue.” He found it, and is “extra happy” that he did.

Faculty or university friends who wish to work with the Russian study students during 2008-09 should contact Mokhnatkin at dina.mokhnatkin@csun.edu or (818) 677-3593.