OK, so I continue to try to learn Tajik, taking private lessons two hours per week since right about the start of this year, or about nine months. I continue most of the time to feel as though I am making glacial-speed progress if I'm moving forward at all, although every now and then I feel some positive energy that allows me to think that maybe I actually am getting somewhere.
I always need to remind myself, I have after all studied Russian on and off, in and out of the classroom, since first beginning it in 1988 -- for twenty-one years! I can't expect, er, Dushanbe to be built in one day, right?
I think part of the difficulty is the variation and lack of standardization in Tajik. Especially if Russian is the yardstick, Tajik is really much different: the regions of Tajikistan are so separate, and you're constantly hearing how different from one another in culture and dialect the north and south are.
The written language and the spoken language are pretty far apart from one another, too -- not unlike in Farsi, but this pair with its own Tajik idiosyncrasies. You can't learn everything of course, so I guess if anything I'm trying to build up some basic ability in spoken Tajik, and then I also try to read some twentieth-century non-fiction (hoping that maybe in this coming year I can hobble through a few newspapers and journals) with my teacher.
Still, it's frustrating -- and I know that ironically part of the reason I don't make faster progress in Tajik is that I do speak Russian fairly comfortably, if not always totally fluently. In any of the interactions where I'd otherwise be forced to practice my Tajik and barely muddle through that way, the most obvious answer from the point of view of efficiency is to just switch into (or, really, remain speaking) Russian. Why speak like a 3-year-old (and that is being very generous to me, or very insulting to a 3-year-old Tajik), when I can speak pretty much from my own stage of mental development in Russian?
The one exception remains the bazaar.
This is why I'm so reluctant to ask someone else to take over our routine shopping: I could ask the housekeeper to get things for us, or the odd-jobs guy we are considering hiring since our friends and his employers left Dushanbe... But if I did that, I'd never practice my Tajik outside of class!
Just this weekend, for instance, my visit to the bustling pre-Eid Barakat bazaar was a fun little chance to see the sellers I regularly buy from and practice a little Tajik. (For some reason I chose the Saturday before Eid to set out to out the Green Market again after a long absence, despite oaths that I would avoid it and the parking hell that reigns on the streets surrounding the market. I could tell several blocks before the bazaar itself that this was a bad idea and luckily was able to turn and escape all of the mishigas. I guess what had inspired me go was the news from along the expat grapevine that avocadoes and limes had been available from one of the sellers. My friends bought the guy's entire stock, but I was tempted to see what other goodies I was missing out on. I think post-Eid I am going to try to go once every couple of weeks... In any case, the Barakat pavilion interior in the photo here was from earlier this summer, on a very empty weekday afternoon.)
At Barakat, the older lady who sells chakka (thick, pasty, tart Tajik yogurt) just inside the pavilion greeted me warmly after my absence (with the traffic torn up and redirected in this part of downtown, I haven't gotten to Barakat as often as I used to). We had the typical greeting exchange, asking after each other's health, and then she sold me my usual 2-somoni handful of chakka, and invited me to her house for Eid on Monday. I did what I hope is an acceptable way of not actually accepting the invitation, smiling, thanking her but stopping short of saying I would come. At least this is what I have been doing about once a day with our next-door neighbor ever since we arrived, in response to his everyday invitations of "coming by" and having plov or tea.
The homely potato-carrot-and-onion seller I go to at the bazaar was also happy to see me. He is actually the brother of the usual guy, but normally they are there working their stand together. Originally I chanced upon the brother who wasn't there today, who at least in my experience seems to be the front man of the operation. To my surprise, he came out with shockingly good English the first time I bought my taters from him (surely choosing to do that because it is clear from about 5 miles away that I am not local -- the really naive ones must think I'm Russian). With this pair of brothers, I usually try to speak Tajik to them and the one brother tries to speak English back to me, as a kind of equal exchange. Today the English-speaker was gone, but the brother who apparently has just the typical Tajik and Russian greeted me with a crooked smile and tried to explain to me everything about fasting for Ramadan (like I hadn't already gotten used to the concept for the past month, but whatever -- it's about the cultural exchange, not about the content, much of the time...).
Then I went to the only melon seller on the side of the pavilion where I was (Barakat was a mess of pre-Eid shoppers too, I wasn't going to traipse around any more than I had to), and here I was out of my element and didn't have anyone familiar to go to. These melon guys immediately started out in Russian, which on the one hand I speak better, but on the other already feels to me like I'm down a few chips in the bargaining process and I have to work to clamber back uphill. Unfortunately I think I got a jacked-up Eid-eve price on my sweet melon -- not necessarily because I'm a foreigner, but it probably didn't help matters.
All that really matters is that I had a pleasant, relatively quick, shopping trip, re-connected a bit with my bazaar peeps, and ensured we'd eat at least one last melon before the season ends. And, as an added bonus, the sellers assured me that I was buying the sweetest melon of the bunch: "guaranteed to do wonders for a lady's figure!" I think they stopped just short of offering a "one-time special price" just for me.
