Klassno

Everyone has a favourite way of learning a foreign language. Some people like big thick grammar books, others prefer patronising exercise books (shoutout to my uni’s course companion of choice Colloquial Russian, which is by far and away the worst language book I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter); some like reading Harry Potter in the target language, or listening to audio books. And almost everyone agrees that being surrounded by native speakers is one of the best methods. But for me, nothing beats a bit of trashy pop music. Sure, French A Level lessons were great, but would I really have had the motivation to keep on cramming vocab without the marvel that is Magic System? And frankly, the French language has never been more beautiful to me than when Section D’Assaut got together to write a bunch of lyrically questionable odes to their mothers, rapped them, slapped on some autotune, and set it to a music video of them hunching their shoulders and bopping awkwardly in front of a string quartet. If my description has inspired you to listen, the song’s called Avant qu’elle parte, and it’s a lowkey masterpiece.

In fact, the junkier the music, the better. If it’s absolute crap which insists on hammering one unsophisticated refrain into your head relentlessly, with no variety and no development, even better. I reckon I must have a pretty thick skull, because once a tune gets in there, it ain’t getting out. And I like belting stuff out loud when it’s in my head, which really endears me to the people around me. Particularly in libraries. The Germans call a tune which gets stuck in your head an ‘Ohrwurm’, or ‘earworm’. My record earworm stuckness duration so far is a whopping (and ongoing) eight years. The offending song is Jennifer Lopez’s ‘On the Floor’, which has been rattling around in my skull trying to find a way out since it was released in 2011. I can only profusely apologise to my housemates from Number 53 last year, who had to endure renditions of ‘NAAAAA NA NA NA NA, NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA (tonight we gon’ be it on the floor)’ at ten-minute intervals for the best part of nine months.

Listening to trashy foreign music is particularly good practice for me, then, because it incorporates listening, speaking (when I invariably try to sing it), and, on one occasion, a bit of self-defense training too (some people really take umbrage at having French rap continuously and aggressively recited at them by near strangers). The problem with languages that I don’t know so well, though, is that when I forget the lyrics, I tend to insert words which sound like they could plausibly belong to the language instead. This works fine for me. As long as I remember not to sing Italian songs around Italian friends, we’re all good. I like to imagine a parallel universe in which an Italian version of me is trying to sing an English language banger like Britney’s Baby One More Time and then runs out of words temptingly close to the chorus, so just adds some plausible fillers:

‘My loneliness is killing me (and I)

I must distress, a still believe (still believe)

When am a weather I lose my mine

Give me desiiiiiiign

Hit me baby one more time!’

Now imagine what I do to Russian songs.

No, it’s worse than that. Whatever you imagined, it’s worse.

I spent a good part of Monday compiling a list of the shoddiest Russian songs I could find. The hope was that, as always, I’d get something stuck in my head, and that I’d end up learning the song by heart when I inevitably play it back several times in the vain hope of getting it out of my head again. It’s a very self-destructive strategy, but I find it gets results, and I’m in no position to be picky. I started with a song that I heard in the cab back from the rap concert on Saturday night. The fact that I remembered the name was testament enough to its catchiness, and I figured it was as good a starting point as any. The song’s called Fear Me, My Enemy, which is a nice understated way to begin a Siberian playlist. Next, I headed to the top 100 charts. As far as I can tell, there’s no official singles chart in Russia, each music app has its own list, which vary hugely from one another. I went for Yandex music, which struck me as the most authentically Russian music provider of the bunch, and worked my way down. I was seriously disappointed by the results. I’m not expecting class from a pop chart, I’m expecting bangers. Russian music gave me neither. There was one – ‘Mama Doesn’t Know’, which had a fairly catchy tune, and was suitably trashy for my taste, but the rest were just incredibly forgettable. I’m now on a quest for Russian songs catchy enough at least to make my flatmate resent me. If anyone knows of any, please come forward!

In other news, I’ve found out that being English in Krasnoyarsk makes you popular. On Monday evening, I met a guy who also does projects for Interra who wanted to meet me because I’m English. I’m worried that at some point, people are going to work out that being English basically means being Russian but speaking fewer languages and being so awkward that you don’t know what to do with your hands when you’re walking, and then I’m going to be shunned. But until that happens, I’m going to make the most of all the free guided tours of Krasnoyarsk and trashy song recommendations I can get. Danil took me to see the famous chapel which is on the 10 rouble note, and then we got shashlik, which is basically kebab. I thought of Bakha the cabbie, and how proud he’d be that I was finally throwing myself into the Russian kebab scene. Danil described shashlik as ‘klassno’, which means cool, but which presumably comes from the English ‘class’. They pronounce it with a wide ‘a’, like a northerner saying ‘that’s class that is’, except with a Russian adverbial ending (I know, it should be adjectival. Try explaining that to the Russian language). I’ve already despaired of expressing this in a way that's clear to Russians, who all seem certain that 'klassno' is an authentically Russian word, but it still makes me laugh.