Transcript of AE 1137 - Interview Going From Beginner to Near-Native in Russian with Justin Hammond - Part 1 [Edited]

G'day, you mob. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing dear friend Justin Hammond. He was on the podcast. Geez, it was a few years back. So Episode 475 He is a language learner like myself. He has taught English, he has done a lot of travelling. He now works with software companies and has done a lot of time living in Russia and Ukraine. So I thought it would be really cool to get him on today.

In this first episode, this is going to be a two part series. We catch up on his language learning experiences, learning French, Mandarin Chinese and then Russian later at university. Why he ended up settling on Russian as a language to take through university and beyond. The difficulties of learning significantly different foreign languages with very different grammar and writing systems compared to English.

How we became a famous YouTuber in Russia. He does all of his videos and skits that he does in these videos in Russian. How to get the most out of an exchange in a foreign country and make sure your target language improves as much as possible. And lastly, the pros and cons of using native versus non-native English teachers or teachers in general.

So anyway, guys, thank you for joining me. Without any further ado, let's get into today's episode. I give you Justin Hammond.

G'day, guys. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. I am blurry on the screen. Let me get back into focus.

Today. I'm here with Justin Hammond, who was on the podcast. I had it up in front of me here. Episode 475. So that was back in 2018. It's been a while between drinks. How are you going, Justin?

Not too bad. Yeah, that has been a while. I've said four years ago, back in 2018.

I know! It's so weird though, you see like 2017, 2018, you don't think it's like four or five years ago, you think, oh, that's, it's a year or two, right? And then you think, shit, it's 2022.

Time flies.

Yeah. So how have you been? What's been going on. And give us a bit of a, a, a nutshell review of what you've been up to in the meantime since 2018.

Sure. So yeah, it's been a while since then. I think when I was on here last I was in Ukraine, if I'm not mistaken or whatnot, which I guess is what we're talking a little bit about today. But since then, it's kind of been back and forth between sort of the Ukraine and Russia and that whole side of the world. I work online or whatnot, so everything for myself, it's been fine and able to move around. But yeah, essentially it was more or less in Ukraine up until very recently when I left due to everything that's been happening. And now I am in the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi.

Very cool. And so how are you finding that? Because again, I'm totally ignorant to the these ex Soviet Union countries and the languages they speak there. So in Georgia, I imagine they speak Georgian or is that a variant or a dialect or something similar to Russian? Educate me and sorry to anyone from Georgia listening to this episode.

So yeah, Georgian is not similar at all to Russian. Different alphabet. It doesn't sound anything like it. It is the main language that's spoken here. However, due to Georgia's past being part of the Soviet Union, Russia even occupying it after that and everything like that, the citizens here would learn Russian in school.

Yeah.

And so basically anybody here over like, 40, you can just speak Russian to them. Like every taxi driver, you speak Russian with them if they don't speak English and that sort of thing. But then around I think it was 2008 when Georgia became occupied by Russia and was attacked, they actually stopped teaching Russian in schools around that time. Like there's still some schools that will teach you and it's kind of optional. But definitely, like, the kids growing up now, they don't seem to speak Russian really as much. Anyone kind of under like 15 or something like that. Like they're not really learning it as I understand, for obvious reasons. So yeah, there's- and that it's quite similar to any other sort of like Eastern European country and being here I honestly feel like between half the people speaking Russian like I just feel like I'm still in Ukraine.

Yeah.

Not really changed that much.

So going back to sort of, I guess, the start, people may not be aware if they haven't followed you and I recommend that you go and check out Justin's YouTube channel. You've been learning Russian for a very long time now and also have a rather large Russian following. What made you decide to pick up Russian as a language? Because it tends to be a language that at least I would imagine the average Australian, given the option of a language at school, would rarely, if ever, come across Russian as an option.

And it's kind of intimidating because it's very difficult, right? Different writing set. You guys have got cases. You know, the pronunciation is pretty intimidating as well. So what made you decide out of all languages to learn to pick Russian?

Sure. So, yeah, good question. I mean, I grew up in Canada where I'm from, and so I grew up learning French. And at the time that I was in university, back when I started learning Russian, my French was already pretty good and I didn't really feel like I needed to sort of affect it anymore at that time. So for me I really was just focussed on learning another language that would be super useful for myself, which is why I actually started with Chinese. I did Chinese for a whole year before I actually gave up on Chinese and switched into doing Russian.

And was this, was this at university? Or was this just in your own time?

So this was a university that was studying Chinese. And then to me, it just got to a point where I felt like I was never really going to master the reading and writing side of Chinese. Like the speaking and the understanding is much simpler than most people think. Grammatically, it's one of the easiest languages to learn. But when it comes to reading and writing, I didn't like this idea of learning all of these new words and how to pronounce them just to forget them like a week later, because there's no phonetic system to the alphabet.

So for myself, which kind of Chinese was kind of in that first place in terms of what might be the most useful for me? I continued looking around at like Google searches for number of the most spoken languages in the world. You sort of have a bunch of Indian languages that come up in the second or third place. Spanish is up there, which would have been the more obvious choice. But...

And the easier choice.

And the easier choice. But learning Spanish in a university in the West is like 200 people in an auditorium. Like it's not personalised at all. And with it being an easier language, I felt like I could always just learn it in the future easily.

So I chose Russian, had a friend that was studying it. It was kind of next up there in terms of most spoken languages. And I also felt like if I were to go to Russia one day and live there, that I wouldn't stand out so much like a foreigner. Like if I were to go to China or South America or anything like that, you could kind of just blend in and sort of live a bit of a more of a normal life. So that's kind of why I chose Russian.

So what was that experience like learning Russian? What were the biggest hurdles to sort of overcome on your way to fluency and becoming really proficient in the language? As I said, you have a YouTube channel that I can't remember. The last time I looked at it. It had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I don't know if you've passed a million yet, but you have a huge, huge following and the videos you create.

I think you were- when we've been chatting in the past, you write these scripts that are entertaining, that are sort of funny, and that's part of the reason you get such a big audience. But it also shows that you have a very good understanding and level and proficiency in the language in order to be able to do that. So what was it like getting from absolute beginner to where you are today in terms of study, in terms of travelling there and having to interact with people, lessons, everything like that.

Sure. So I think with Russian, the way that I try to explain it to people is that, yes, it is a difficult language, but there are rules for everything in Russian. So like in comparison to English, where there's so many exceptions, like the language of exceptions in Russian, you know, people can explain to you why something is said that way and find you like the exact rule that explains that. So I would argue that like the learning curve in Russian, for example, would it's very steep at the beginning because you're learning all these rules, these genders, these cases and the way all these things interact with each other, which is something that's so unfamiliar to someone who speaks in a language that's not that doesn't use cases.

But then once you get past that and you kind of get into that sort of like mid intermediate level and you've learnt most of the grammar, I think that it's not terribly hard. I don't think it's a language that people necessarily speak super quickly, like Spanish as an example, like people are generally a little bit slower and that kind of thing. So I think in that respect.

Could you explain quickly, though, what a case is for those people listening who don't speak a language that have cases in them?

Sure. So basically, cases are just ways that you change nouns in a sentence in order to explain the role of that noun in that thing. So, for example, if we talk about 'the boy threw the ball', right? 'The boy' is in what's called a nominative case. He's just the subject of the sentence. But 'the ball' is the direct object, right, that he's throwing. So in Russian, the word for ball will actually change its ending to show that it's the thing that the boy is acting upon. Right? These are the things that he's throwing. And then if he's throwing that ball to somebody, the person that's receiving the ball is the indirect object. So they're also- they're ending will be changed a little bit as well because they're the indirect object.

And what that allows you to do is that word order like in English is not as important. In English, it's very important to put your subject in the object and then the indirect object. Whereas in Russian you could change these words around and it would still make sense: who's throwing the ball and who's receiving it. Because the words have been conjugated into their essentially their use case, their case or whatnot, according to their endings.

I feel like that I've started learning Ukrainian as of like two weeks ago and for obvious, for obvious reasons. But I feel like that's going to be the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around, getting used to intuitively being able to adjust the word endings for subjects, objects, direct objects, whilst also conjugating verbs, and then also having that, that fluidity of where you're putting the words in a phrase and being able to pass that when, when someone's speaking to. Being able to hear it out of order because I speak languages that are all, I guess what is it, subject, verb, object, right. So they are S-V-O languages.

So that's going to be a mind fuck, I think when, when and if I ever get to that stage. Did you- did you have that trouble? Like the I guess it's the neurolinguistics, like understanding that grammar, internalising that grammar, and getting to a point where you just, it became second nature and you didn't have to think about it anymore. Was that a bigger hurdle you found in, say, Russian than when you were learning French? And it's much closer to English, right?

So to an extent, like I do, I am at a point now where it's very internalised. I don't think about it, but when you are learning it, this whole idea that, you know, in Russian you can just put words in any order that you want. That's not entirely true because people do generally speak the same way. So if you take, for example, a sentence like 'I love you' in Russian, you could say 'you love I' or 'I, you love', and it would make sense. But the reality is, is that nobody does that. They still say, 'I love you'.

So there's still sort of a consensus, right? These are the common patterns that we're going to use.

Exactly. And so this whole idea of like, usually the reason why case has become so handy is that you can simply- you can- a lot of times that you can drop certain pronouns. You can drop other information that you don't need. Right? You can just- if you're conjugating verbs, for example, which we don't do in English, in the same way, if you want to say (speaks in Russian) like that is the word 'to go', but it's already conjugated into the form of 'you'. So I don't need to say, 'where are you going?' I'm just saying literally, like 'where go?'. And it makes sense that I'm saying, 'where are you going?' Because I've already conjugated the verb.

So because of that, especially with writing, you can really remove pieces of information because you don't need those extra words that we use in English to help translate that concept so we get it across.

How did you go with the writing system? That's something that I came up against obviously immediately and was like, Good God, there are so many letters here that- there are letters that represent the same sounds as in English, you know, say things like, what's one off the top of my head? Like the K symbol or the T symbol, or there's still K and T sounds, but then they'll have symbols like the backwards N, which is a vowel sound or the backwards R, which is “Я”.

And my brain is constantly screwing me over because I've like learnt the sound. I understand that the backwards R is "ya" sound, but still when I see a word and it's in the middle of the word, instantly I think "ra". The P is the R symbol or the R sound. The P symbol is the R sound. So how did you go learning that?

And then I've heard also that cursive writing is insane in, in Russian, and Ukrainian, where there's a lot of looping and everything and the letters all look very similar. So have you bothered to learn stuff like the cursive writing and had trouble with that as well? So yeah, what's your experience been?

So the alphabet you'll find is much easier than you're expecting. You can learn it- honestly, you can learn it in like 2 hours. And like the written form of it, and be able to start like reading and pronouncing words. Part of the reason that why Russian and Ukrainian are so much more fanatical than English is because in English, where we use a combination of letters to produce a sound like 'sh' is- so the "sh" sound is actually just one single letter in Russian.

So if you take a word like 'station' in English, the 'tion' depending on its roots and where it comes from, it sounds like "shun". Whereas in Russian you would see a word like 'station', it would just be pronounced. (speaks in Russian) It's pronounces as it's shown to you. And so that's what makes essentially like picking up the speaking and pronunciation. Exceptions basically don't exist so much easier. And of course having like dedicated letters for certain sounds with this idea of certain letters looking like English letters, but then they're kind of different, they have different sounds.

That doesn't really become a problem because you're usually always like you never looking at letters on their own. You're always looking at it within the context of a word. And it's probably the same like in Portuguese, which you speak, where your mind just kind of swaps to it. And then it's not an issue. It's really, it's one of those like basic kind of things, like learning to ride a bike and it's easy to get past the training wheels. You've never even thought about this idea of like your balance after that. And so. It's- I wouldn't say it's that difficult in that sense. Yeah, definitely not at all.

I feel like it's a beginner issue. Right. Same with the Portuguese and getting used to all the different vowel pronunciation and a big thing that I found difficult in Portuguese was anticipating nasal vowels when certain consonant sounds come after a vowel sound that you read in a word.

So if you have a vowel and then there's an M or an N, usually, you have the nasal as the vowel sound before it. Or you could say that they combine to create a nasalised vowel and you don't actually pronounce the M or the N. So internalising that took a very long time, where you could actually read and anticipate the nasalization, especially in words that you'd never seen before. But yeah, I feel like potentially that's the issue with Ukrainian at the moment. I'm still working really hard.

It's so funny. You go back to- whenever you learn a language with a new alphabet, you feel like a, like a really young child learning to read and write again. Where they're like, okay, sound out the word. What's this letter? And you're they're like, going st-, st-, oh it's 'stop', 'stop'!

You know, you totally forget what it was like and how much work you had to put in as a small child to just learn your first alphabet and then being able to associate the words that you can already say with those symbols that you see on paper, right? So hopefully that's something if I continue with Ukrainian that it disappears pretty quickly, but at least that it's it is phonetic by the sounds of it. Or by the looks of it so far. So that's always a gift, especially when you when you consider English, right.

Well, that concept. You've probably seen this before like this. I don't know what even what it's called, this little trick for English speakers where they take a text of several words. And I think as long as the first letter in the last letter and like the consonants are there or it's just the vowels are there, you can remove all the other letters and you can actually still read the sentence.

And it's kind of similar to that. Like when you think about learning like in Russian, you know, where you're talking about, like you're sounding out the words, but then eventually you just stop. You don't read letters ever, like in English, right? You just see the word and you know, that word produces a sound in your mind, but you never sound it out. And that's kind of how it is, right? Like with Russian-

Weirdly, I was learning about this and I think this is why we use an upper and lower case quite a lot. And we have, I think it's sort of over the last several hundred years, we've, I think we've sort of standardised the way that we use all the letters and everything in the upper case and lower case. And you'll see on signs and everything that it's really important to have both words with a capital at the start and then lowercase in the word so that you can see the word and just know from a distance.

So like when you're driving and you see a sign with towns on it, you don't even need to read. You don't even need to be able to see the letters independent- independently to be able to read the word. You can just see the symbol that the word effectively is and instantly know. Oh shit. Okay, that's Melbourne on the sign there. And so it is interesting, I was, I was reading about this and that English is very, it's sort of halfway between what Chinese would be with pictographs effectively, right. Like images for words that have no association with the pronunciation in themselves and then languages that are 100% phonetic.

And so English is that halfway point where you're forced to just memorise the shape of the word that you see on the page effectively, and associate that with the pronunciation, especially with vowels, because quite often the letters themselves don't necessarily correspond directly to the pronunciation, their pronunciation. So it was one of these interesting things where I was like, Holy crap, I never realised that English- I've- my brain effectively just recognises words as individual symbols.

So that when I'm reading, I don't, I don't think about sounding out the vowel sounds and the consonants. It's just, you know, there's the word and there's the pronunciation, bang, in the vault. And I have to explain that to English students all the time that don't rely on just being able to pronounce the word based on the letters you need to just especially for the most common words, learn the pronunciation and just memorise it and see the word as a symbol. So it is something pretty cool.

There is a collection of words, right, in English that I don't remember what the term is for them, but words that do are pronounced based on what they sound like, like muck or slop or something.

So like onomatopoeia is as well where they're like, I guess like woof, right? For, for dogs, the sound that dogs make and everything. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've been obviously- you learnt Russian to fluency you, you did that at university and then after that what happened? You decided you know what, I want to move to Russia and just embrace the culture and live there for a while?

So going into university, I already knew that, as many people do in the West, they want to do an exchange during their third year. So that's when I took the opportunity to go to Russia for the first time was in my third year of university. I kind of figured like, if you're going to go to another country anyways, you might as well work on learning a new language while you're at it. And then I just really enjoyed it. Like that first year that I was in Russia during my third year of university.

Made a lot of friends. Studied Russian every day. And then I came back, finished my university degree, and then decided before hopping into a career and all that kind of stuff, to head back to Russia for a bit and was teaching English after that. So I think that to me, once you kind of go and you experience it and you make a ton of friends, it's almost like hard to come back, in a sense. But yeah, I did end up going back for the second year immediately after university.

I had a question on the tip of my tongue that I was going to ask, Oh, how did you manage, once you were there, studying Russian and improving your Russian? This is something that I get asked all the time by people who come to Australia and they set up here, you know, they want to live here, they want to improve their English. But I know plenty of people who live here and their English hasn't improved since they arrived. Right. And then there are other people who don't come here and study English at home and it skyrockets. So did you have a sort of a difficult time, an easy time? Were you really strict with yourself? What did that look like in order to get your Russian to, well, obviously, where it was at the end of your third year there.

Yeah. So I'd say that it's really just about your environment. Like when I was there, I was obviously studying every day at the university, so that helped a lot. But if you're thinking about people that kind of come to a new country and they're not just studying the language there, I mean, I would still encourage them if they feel like their language is stalling, to be actively studying like once or twice a week in an evening class or whatever it is.

But more importantly, because I was like, it's all about your social life and just how much you encounter it and how much you use it. Like I was going out when I was there, every single night I was at like an event, speaking club language exchange. Out with friends. We're going to walk and you meet a lot of people who don't speak English very well and you're just forced to speak Russian with them. And so between like the studying during the day and then literally going out every single night, you know, you can just, every time you go out, you just kind of pick up a couple of new words. And I found like, that process just kept snowballing over time where you might hear a word in the lesson and then later I might see you on a billboard and later hear someone say it, and then you just kind of start picking it up. And it's just that continual process over time where I've always felt like my grammar necessarily never got better if I wasn't actively studying Russian.

Your vocabulary would go up a lot. And so really you would just kind of force yourself into taking more lessons like that once or twice a week of studying to kind of make sure that your grammar and how you're using all these new words kind of keeps up with this new vocab that you're bringing in. And then, more importantly, just the confidence that that gives you a speaking where I know a lot of people are just like afraid to do speaking and practise speaking and everything. Whereas I was speaking so much like I was either texting people in Russian all the time and then just kind of learning like parrot the way they kind of write things. But also just being out with your friends and hearing how they say things and everything like that, and you just get used to speaking it or whatnot. I feel like that just really made it so much easier when you speak it, you remember it so much better, everything like that.

I think that's the key to really developing fluency, right? And you don't realise when you first start learning a foreign language that you actually, to be really fluent you kind of need that. Obviously the basics of all the main grammar points that you're going to be using when speaking, and not even the majority of grammar, right? You're going to be using the same patterns all the time.

Like in English, you'll be using the simple present, the simple past, the present continuous way more often than a lot of those structures that will be like, I will have been there or when I was young, I would do this all the time. And you don't realise that you, one, you just need to sort of focus on that grammar. And then two, when you're speaking with people, you're kind of like doing reps of these techniques effectively and it just becomes internalised so quickly that that's, that's ironically one of the big keys to improving your, your fluency.

You can't really- I don't feel like you can do it on your own. It's kind of like learning to dance. I mean, there's so there's only so much you can kind of do as a single person trying to dance. But if you're trying to learn to tango, right, you need another person there to feed off. So did you find that that having friends and everything and obviously being social, was way more important for your fluency and proficiency than studying independently? Or do they kind of go hand in hand?

I think it's a yeah, it's a combination of both. And I think it largely comes down to like what type of person you are because it really comes down to like doing the same thing over a long period of time and not giving it up.

I do think that like no matter how much you study on your own, like you're going to have to practise. That's just the reality of it. Same thing. If you're dancing and you're watching dance videos like you could definitely get better than someone who doesn't watch anything, but you would still need to practise with somebody to eventually get it. So I think it is it is a bit of a combination like of learning those new words.

But I would say like the speaking and the practise part of it, I always felt like I never necessarily, like, was learning new things but rather solidifying what I already knew.

Yeah.

And getting more confident at what I already knew. But the new like vocab and like, yeah, you pick up a few things here and there from your conversations, but a lot of that, like new vocab and new ways of doing things and saying things came from like the act of studying part of it. So they do. It's kind of like you learn it and then you go out and practise it. But like with speaking, because I feel like that's just one thing that the studying never really gave us very well was the speaking part of it.

And you can speak with like a teacher one on one on Skype or whatever, and that's great to an extent. It's not the same as like getting yelled at in like a grocery store because you forgot something and being able to like really comprehend that in the way they say it and like different voices and people who speak louder and quieter and you know, all that kind of stuff. So, you do just kind of learn how people talk eventually and practise it more.

Did you- did you find that it was the sort of snowballing effect with your confidence when speaking and everything? Right. Because I have a lot of people ask, how do I improve speaking confidence? And I hate just giving them that sort of dumb answer of speak more, dude, you know, like, but it feels like a big part of it is obviously having good self esteem, in the first place, and how you view yourself is really important.

But then just doing more of the thing you're trying to get better at is going to make you become more confident with doing it right because you're going to see yourself being confident. So did you notice that when you were doing it, was that a big part of boosting your confidence?

Oh, 100%. And I think it's funny actually that that understanding, like why people think that learning a language is any different than like shooting free throws for like basketball or whatnot. It's like someone who's not shooting free throws at all, or maybe they're shooting one a week, but then wondering like, Well, how do I get better at this in any other scenario? Like, it would just make total sense in our brain to be like, Well, yeah, obviously I need to shoot more free throws. Though when it comes to languages, I think because it's not like this physical thing, people don't necessarily see it in the same way, or like going to a gym and getting fitter or whatnot.

Like it's the exact same thing. Like just you need you're wondering why you're not getting bigger, but you're not lifting weights, that kind of thing.

Pause you there. I think it would be sort of like, okay, I want to get better at shooting free throws, but when I practise them, it has to be with Michael Jordan. Or when I go to the gym, like native speakers, right? And when I go to the gym and workout, it'll be with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And you're going to be like, oh, shit. Like, I'm totally embarrassed and not confident at all with these people around me.

And I think that's part of the issue right, too, where people put native speakers on a massive pedestal and get nervous talking around them.

Well, just, let's just do it right. Like you wouldn't think of karate in the belt system, right? Like they don't put the white belt up against the black belt. They put you against people like one belt higher to challenge you when you're just constantly keeping up right and kind of thing.

And that's kind of the way you do it is you just kind of work through those stages. That's not to say like Michael Jordan couldn't help you.

Oh, for sure. Exactly. Exactly.

The value in terms of especially what you're paying. Right. Like that's the other thing is, is there a financial angle there? Are you paying for making practise and stuff like that, or teaching? You know, I always argue that I think like a lot of people are spending more money on a native English speaking teacher to teach them grammar when like a Russian teacher could teach them so much better. Like, really studied it.

And then when you're ready, like if you really want to get like that accent part down, then you might spend the time or whatever with the native speaker. But I really think people are, it's the brand, the branding of it being like, Oh, it's a native speaker or like it's Michael Jordan or whatever, but it's going to improve me so much more, so much faster. And that's not necessarily true. I'm sure Michael Jordan would teach you to shoot a free throw the same way your local basketball coach would.

I've often found that that the experts tend to be somewhat useless at times because they've internalised everything to the point, especially someone like Michael Jordan, who's probably learnt, you know, I haven't looked into it but I imagine he learnt from a kid, right? So that he's probably never actively thought about his exact movements.

I mean maybe he has, but I remember when I was doing fencing, I used to do fencing at school when I competed at the sort of state level. And there was a, there was a a Commonwealth Games champion there once who was fencing with me and I was asking her for advice and she's like, Fuck, I don't know, mate, I just do it. I remember that that stuck with me forever because I was just like, Holy shit, this person is like top of her game. And I'm asking her like, What do I do here? And she's like, Mate, I never taught. I don't know. I get taught. I get told what I need to do. But I've never actually had to think about how to explain this to someone else. My body just does it.

And so I think that's part of the issue, right? With native speakers, quite often the native speakers are really good, but whether or not they're good teachers and whether or not they can actually ever express what they're doing effectively so that you can internalise that as quickly as possible and at a price that's fair, that that's the sort of dodgy side of it. I think.

We'll go ask like a native English speaker who's not a teacher to go explain one use present perfect. And what isn't perfect even is. Like, they wouldn't be able to tell you so.