In the United States, I am generally over-educated and well-spoken.  I am a certified writing tutor, a senior in an English literature program,which means that I am generally well-read in many areas.

In Lithuania, I am illiterate.  I came to the country knowing three words of Lithuanian, and with three years of Russian study spread over the space of seven. This means I know several thousand words, but they are tossed around the language willy-nilly, and they really don’t add up to much as far as actual communication goes. If you need to know the archaic literary term for pen, though, I am your girl.

For the first six months of my stay here, I was taking classes in Lithuanian and Russian concurrently.  Now, I can order a meal in Lithuanian, buy a pack of cigarettes, and grocery shop if I am willing to take the risk that what I think I am buying is maybe not what I am actually buying.

Going from well-spoken to dumb can make you want to scream.

Over the last seven months, I have gotten pretty good at guessing and measured use of the few words that I learned in my one semester of Lithuanian, while avoiding speaking Russian entirely.  This was my strategy up until a few weeks ago, when I decided to radically change my approach to language learning and language use in my everyday life.

Basically, I decided to stop butchering the few dozen Lithuanian words that I know and to begin butchering the hundreds of Russian words I know.  This strategy came into full effect when I needed to pick up my favorite shoes from the nice neighborhood shoe repairman and my Lithuanian-speaking roommate was unavailable.

When we went to drop them off, I had heard him speaking Russian to another customer, so I had a good idea that he wouldn’t mind my speaking Russian to him. I also had other shoes to be repaired, so that necessitated a little bit of extra explanation and a few words written on my hand before I went, so that I would be able to tell him what I needed.

The trip went as well as you might expect. I walked in, managed the pleasantries pretty well, then as I tried to explain what I was there for the conversation rapidly devolved into me just saying words at him, with him supplying the context. There was a lot of gesturing. In the end, he was very nice to me, I learned a couple of new words, and I got both of my favorite shoes fixed.

The next day, I needed to go to a sewing store to get some supplies to repair a sweater. It was a bit of an impulse decision, I just stopped at a store on my way home that promises to have everything for sewing.

To say that they have everything for sewing is a bit of an overstatement of fact, since the shop in its entirety is maybe 10 sq m.  They had ribbon, but it was behind the counter.  When you don’t know the language, things being behind the counter makes it nearly impossible to get what you want without making a huge scene and imposing upon other customers to help you.

Before my recent decision to just ask people if they speak Russian and then say words at them until they understand, I probably would have just walked out rather than wasting everyone’s time and embarrassing myself.

Again, I was reduced to picking things up and saying things like “like this, but not like this” and then saying colors.  There was a fair amount of gesturing, but I walked out of the shop a few minutes later with the thing that I needed, and it wasn’t an unbelievable mess like it would have been had I relied entirely on my personal English-Lithuanian pidgin language like I had been for the last eight months.

Still, even though everyone that I have spoken Russian with for the last few weeks has been more than kind, I kind of feel like a jerk focusing on Russian while I am living in Lithuania, and not only because I am terrible at speaking the language.

More because I feel like I am missing out on the greater part of living here because I am so unaware of what is going on around me. Since my current goal is simply to make myself understood without speaking English, using Russian is a better choice than just avoiding situations where I need to speak to strangers or hoping that when I do need to speak to strangers, they speak English.

That seems quite a burden to put on the people around me, when I have the ability to use one of the languages that is spoken widely in Vilnius.

Charissa Brammer is an American student that has been studying at Vilnius University since the fall. Read more of her writing here.

Disclaimer:

Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.