Russian Fall in Cards. From Babye Leto to the First Frost

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

The month I put in teaching the wrong half

A twelve-year-old not far from Boston was at pains to explain why her family had put an early end to the garden work that year. She had four words out of her before she put a stop to it.

«Холодно (kholodno),» she put it. Cold. An uncomfortable silence followed, then «мы убрали сад (my ubrali sad), we cleared the garden.»

There the two facts sat side by side with nothing in between. In English the because would have come unbidden, in the same breath and without her being aware of it.

We had been over fall vocabulary for a month, that girl and I. Leaves, rain, boots, harvest. Every word in the sentence was one she knew, yet she could not put it together.

Why I persisted with the wrong half

The nouns were not the issue, though I was the one to make them so. Vocabulary is something you can see and that is the plain reason I went on with it when the evidence was no longer there. A parent putting down money for Russian lessons will note twenty new words. No one sees a conjunction. When her mother inquired after our progress I put forward a list of what we had done and it made for good showing.

I ran through the list again next month and the one after. New words but the same shape to them and the same void in the middle of her sentences. It required another student a year down the line for me to see what I was looking at.

A Russian fall is a state of affairs, not a date

In America the seasons are calendar bound. September brings school. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, weather or not.

Not so in a Russian home. The year is dictated by the weather and by what must be done before it changes, so the topics of conversation do not have set dates.

Бабье лето (bab’ye leto) is the prime example. Some warm days will show up after the first cold ones, usually in September. Russia is too vast for any one to give you an exact date and call it representative of the whole country; they are only telling you about their part of it. You cannot say it is the twelfth. One has to put it in relation to something else happening at the time. And that is the source of the grammar. Something without a date requires a clause to contain it. As for the names, English has its Indian summer and Russian бабье лето, both of disputed origin. There is no accounting for them here since every story is a guess put on with confidence.

 Four joins in October

Families out in the garden in October will say пока тепло, мы работаем в саду (poka teplo, my rabotayem v sadu). We are at work in the garden while the warmth lasts. All know it is only for a time. That understanding is in the пока.

Then there is так как (tak kak). The reason comes first with this one, which is how you will generally encounter it. It is the more formal of the two and a child will come across it in a book before at the dinner table. The nights turned cold and the roses were put under cover. In Russian the order is так как ночи холодные, бабушка укрыла розы (tak kak nochi kholodnyye, babushka ukryla rozy).

Because, uh. (potomu chto) is the everyday variety the children already have in hand. It does the same thing from the other side and is immovable. Because it has to follow the result, unlike так как. To switch between them is a matter of register. Turn it around and you have бабушка укрыла розы, потому что ночи холодные (babushka ukryla rozy, potomu chto nochi kholodnyye). The nights and roses are the same, the order is not.

Children do not go for благодаря тому что (blagodarya tomu chto). It is too long and too particular about its reason. It has to be a good reason. Благодаря тому что осень тёплая, яблок много (blagodarya tomu chto osen’ tyoplaya, yablok mnogo), or in English, there are plenty of apples on account of a warm fall.

The research and what I did not want from it

Children will put down потому что (potomu chto) early on and leave the rest alone. One join does most of the work, so why look for more. Some research to substantiate that would be handy, but on the central issue there is none.

Martynova, Zuban, Gagarina, and Szucsich studied 195 Russian speakers, 68 heritage speakers in the US being among them. As far as embedded clauses go, heritage and monolinguals act the same. Not one bit less. What set them apart was something else: the heritage speakers had a greater sensitivity to formality, an awareness of register in the authors’ view.

I have seen my twelve-year-old in Boston do this with my own eyes. It is not some pattern in the literature. I prefer to state it as is rather than put a spin on it with another’s findings.

Inside the clause is where the research has found something. Zuban and his team report that in the US heritage speakers put words in a more English order in their embedded clauses than either monolinguals or those in Germany. The oddity is that their main clauses were perfectly unremarkable while all this was going on a level below.

Then there is the wider argument the field puts forward. Kisselev, Dubinina, and Polinsky make the case that structural accuracy is a lasting trouble for heritage speakers. I have found this to be true even of those who sound completely at home in the language.

What made it happen

One can build every sentence from short bits and still sound entirely at ease.

I put an end to teaching fall words. It took some nerve since the word lists were the visible evidence of progress. We turned to one question a week over a call with her grandmother in Voronezh. Why you did that this year. Not what you did. Why.

For a month it was poor going. She would start in Russian, the join would be lost and she would wind up in English while her grandmother bided her time instead of translating, which was no easy task for the grandmother. Week two was the low point. She declared the calls a waste to her mother and wanted the word lists back. I was tempted to concur.

What put an end to the retreat was a matter of detail: her sentences were lengthening before they broke. They still broke and still ended in English, but further along each week.

In the end the weather put it to rest. An early hard frost in November saw to it that the garden question and with it any need to explain the weather around the house went away. The calls did not. By December the joins were in place. Her vocabulary had not budged one way or the other in the intervening months, a fact I would put before any parent fretting over word counts.

A child with nothing to explain will have no use for a subordinate clause and a word list will not supply one.

This week give that question a try. Why it happened as it did, not what happened today.

At Palme School we teach children online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. Both courses above take bookings the same way, and the printable material is free whether or not you ever book anything.

Frequently asked questions

What is бабье лето (bab’ye leto)?

A warm spell that arrives after the first cold days, often in September. It has no fixed date, and the timing varies widely across the country, which is why describing it needs a clause rather than a number.

What is the difference between так как (tak kak) and потому что (potomu chto)?

Both give a reason. Так как is the more formal one and can go before the result or after it; потому что is the everyday one and only ever comes after.

Do bilingual children use fewer subordinate clauses than monolingual ones?

Not according to the study that looked at it directly, which compared 195 speakers. Heritage and monolingual speakers were found to use embedded clauses at similar rates. What differed was word order inside those clauses, which drifted toward English among heritage speakers in the US.

My child speaks Russian easily but in short sentences. Is that a problem?

It’s extremely common, and it’s worth working on. Fluency and complexity develop separately, and the easy speaking can hide how little joining is going on underneath.

Sources

• Kisselev, O., Dubinina, I., & Polinsky, M. (2020). Form-focused instruction in the heritage language classroom: Toward research-informed heritage language pedagogy. Frontiers in Education, 5, 53. doi.org
• Martynova, M., Zuban, Y., Gagarina, N., & Szucsich, L. (2024). Use of embedded clauses in heritage and monolingual Russian. Languages, 9(5), 157. doi.org
• Zuban, Y., Martynova, M., Zerbian, S., Szucsich, L., & Gagarina, N. (2021). Word order in heritage Russian: Clause type and majority language matter. Russian Linguistics, 45, 253. doi.org

Palme School: Conversation school · Russian for bilingual children · Free materials for learners

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.