The time Madeleine Albright made a beeline to talk to me
I once heard Madeleine Albright speak.
I really don’t care for the amount of death and destruction she caused in the world. I wanted a word with her.
Well, after she got done talking at this event — held in a cathedral in Washington, D.C., she had a fan club around her. There were dozens of 20-something and 30-something-year-old women crowded in close, all hoping for a chance to one day be the next Madeleine Albright. They wanted to bask in her presence.
I looked at the situation and saw that my chances of speaking to her were low, especially with her fan club around her.
On top of that, she was trying to get out the door.
I wondered what might improve my odds.
A little known fact about Albright was that she was born in Prague before World War Two. Marie Jana Korbelová was her birth name.
I wondered how much Czech she might still know. I knew a few words. Could she possibly still know Czech after all these years?
From beyond the perimeter of the fan club that surrounded her, I called out a greeting to her in the Czech language.
Mid-sentence, she turned away from the fangirls fawning praise over her. Albright almost uncontrollably pivoted her head toward the Czech words, made eye contact with me, and her body slowly followed as the fan club parted around her.
She could not believe her ears. She walked towards me, ignoring everyone around her.
The rest of her time spent in that building would be with me.
My friend Peter, now passed on, my most dear, most skilled language teacher, used to tell me “When you speak a person’s native language, you speak to their heart.” Those words have never failed me.
No matter what, no matter how futile the pronunciation, no matter how butchered the accent, I know how much it means to the other person.
Some years later, I was trying to make sense of the Russian alphabet for the twentieth or maybe thirtieth time. I would painstakingly learn it, use it for a trip, and forget it, having to repeat the same process all over the next time I traveled to the Cyrillic lands.
I knew there had to be an easier way. I eventually figured out an easier way. But boy did it take me a lot of work. As unbelievable as it sounds, in under an hour, I can teach any English speaker to read the Russian alphabet, and that person will know it for life.
Once I had the system figured out, it was so easy to use, so useful, and yet so inventive of a way of learning the Russian alphabet that word spread through the right circles about my method. It turned into a fun hobby of mine. Then one day, even the Pentagon tracked me down. The United States Department of Defense has used this hobby of mine, has used my method for teaching the Russian alphabet for some of its many language trainees.
And it’s not just Russian. The other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet have almost the same alphabets, with some minor differences in letters. This method can be used to create a solid base in any of them. If you can read an English language newspaper, you can use my method to learn the Russian alphabet.
It was an ingenious technique that cost me a lot of effort to finally discover. If you’re someone who likes languages, within an hour, I can have you reading Russian.
https://DoctorRussian.com
As for getting the Madeleine Albrights of the world to part crowds to come talk to you, that is a matter I will leave for another time.
Allan Stevo