ЕГЭ по английскому языку (аудирование №7: детальное понимание текста)

Language and Me

Language has always been a struggle. When I was a very young child, my father was working on his dissertation at Yale University. My mother worked to earn a living while he climbed the academic ladder. That left me with a Negro maid for a companion. Everyone was too busy to talk, so I grew up largely without language or, at most, its very basics: an angry rebuke here, a grunt there. My brother, two years older, might have made an effort, but he was in elementary school and thought I was too dumb to spend time with. I grew to be five years old, talking very little and very badly. These are the years in which the cells that wire the brain for language are most active, and less so thereafter.

Boys develop language later than girls, so that added another burden as I struggled through primary school. By the time I was beginning to make progress, the family moved to another part of the country that had a very different dialect, as well as some odd social customs that led me to avoid conversation. I remember trying to speak like they did by saying. ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Yes, ma’am’, when before I’d answered adults with a polite ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Then in my effort to use the new tongue I made a fatal mistake. I violated regional customs by saying ‘Yes, ma’am’ to a black woman, bringing ridicule and contempt on myself by unforgiving classmates. Thereafter I decided to remain mostly mute.

In secondary school, I was a good enough student, but lazy and satisfied with В grades. I didn’t have the language skills, nor did I come from the right part of the country to feel comfortable talking to girls. Instead I drew attention to myself in sports and mathematics. I could work math problems faster than the instructor, which brought me certain fame; and I played basketball better than most at that school.

As I approached my senior year, my parents decided to do something about my verbal poverty, neglected for so long, by insisting that I enroll in a course in Latin. By that time, I was old enough to rebel, so I enrolled like a good son and failed without a second thought.

Skill in math, athletic ability, and the fact that my father was a professor who passed on to me and my brother good, textbook English, earned me an appointment to the US Naval Academy. At that time the course of study was the same for everyone, Electrical Engineering, with one exception: foreign language. We could choose the language we wanted to study. But a problem remained: how would I, with my lack of verbal skill, compete against those who had studied three years of French in high school, four years of Spanish, or two of German? The solution became obvious when I saw the list of choices. I would take Russian and be assured of a level playing field. Had there been Chinese or Swahili on the list, the choice might have taken longer.

Russian language studies at the Naval Academy opened new worlds. Little need be said about the quality of instruction, which was designed solely to produce junior naval officers with useful skills. Instruction consisted of memorizing pages of technical vocabulary that might be used in talking to a Russian pilot who boarded to guide the ship to port, ordering supplies from Russian merchants, joining Russian officers on maneuvers, etc, I left the language program not knowing the Russian words for horse, or grass, or even green.

But it wasn’t fatal. For studying the language led to a study of Russian history and literature which immediately became a passion. What a world Pushkin and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and many, many others opened to an American student who had been fed nothing but anti-Soviet propaganda since the end of World War II (the Great Patriotic War)! In time, the fragile balance between studying naval boilers and Russian life couldn’t last. I left the Naval Academy in the third year of study to begin an academic career that focused on Russian History and World Civilization.