I was not built for teaching. I wanted to live in Russia. But that could only be achieved through a work permit. Teaching became my entrance visa.
Two decades ago, I taught English for the first time in a Russian city called Voronezh. I taught at the Institute of Law and Economics and the State University of the Russian Federation.
I knew the best way to get familiar with a Russian city far from home: leave what belongs at home, at home. Bring everything you need. That’s what it means to live abroad.
Teaching was a challenge. Some days, I had all the right answers. Other days, my personal math wouldn’t add up. But my worst day working in Russia was better than my best day back home.
One night, in a snowstorm, I walked home from the university and stood alone at the foot of Lenin’s statue in Lenin Square. I looked at his outstretched arm and commanding gaze. I wondered if he ever saw me in his ideology — a Canadian English teacher in the so-called free republic of Russia, now ruled by yet another Russian tyrant.
I crunched off into the snow.
In class, I used to begin by telling my students that English was a “bastard language,” cobbled together from distant roots — Germanic verbs, French nouns, Latin borrowings, Greek constructions. But I dropped that claim.
English is more than that.
It is an unusually complex and near-universally versatile language. I learned the steep territory of its structure only by teaching it.
Working through photocopied workbooks, I discovered how little I understood my own language — and how much I had underestimated the attention span of non-native learners. It turns out, English is an intentional language: built for expression, for transmission of information, for uniting people. And for better or worse, it's aiming to be the language of the world.
“Do you know what a foreign accent is?
It’s a sign of bravery.”
— Amy Chua
Some days, Tatyana — a second-year teacher (they often call themselves professors) — would ask me to run the class through the past perfect, show contractions, or lecture on non-Euclidean grammar. My interest in languages helped me endure what could have been a savage experience, were I not fascinated by the product.
Often, I learned the content the night before. Sometimes, during the lesson. One evening, a student named Nastya rang my bell.
“Can you check my passive voice?”
And so, I learned the passive voice.
We use language every day without the honor or precision it deserves. We skip across puddles of English in our minds — puddles that carry an almost endless history.
It’s strange that someone can beg for spare change on a Canadian street with perfect grammar, complex syntax, and no sense of the linguistic miracle pouring out of their mouth.
English is phenomenal — capable of expressing every obscurity the human mind can conjure. Some languages run out of explanatory capacity. English multiplies it.
In Russia, language is the golden ring.
My students were quick, engaged, and getting sharper by the day. They wanted — needed — the careless fluency of native English speakers. The slang, the cadence, the sarcasm, the subtext. They needed English to surf the web, to watch Hollywood films without mismatched lips, to become air traffic controllers.
English governed everything.
They saw it clearly.
We, as native speakers, often don’t.
I was surrounded by Russian. If I wanted a drink, a loaf of bread, or had a bathroom encounter with the school’s president, I had to communicate in Russian.
The basics — “good morning,” “how much?” — were spoken many times a day. And I loved it. I loved the daily rituals of language exchange.
I was such an oddity in Voronezh that old people would stop me and ask for proof that I was Canadian. Many had not seen a foreigner since the Germans in 1945.
Everything around me was in Cyrillic — an alphabet both exciting and enigmatic. The Russian alphabet contains 33 letters: 21 consonants, 10 vowels, and 2 letters without sound, 11 Greek, 11 Latin echoes, and 11 utterly unique Russian symbols.
"Я случайно. Русский язык очень сложный для изучения, но оно того стоит."
“Russian is difficult to learn, but it’s worth it.”
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
— Charlemagne
As I learned Russian, I climbed into a language whose words came in unfamiliar order, with new stresses, syntactic inversions, and a gendered logic that baffled me. And through it, I gained empathy for my students.
They learned from me. I learned from them.
When I lived in Estonia, I watched the Russian signs come down as independence took hold. Estonian, with its Roman script, didn’t have much of a future. Russian, though — Russian held a secret door.
Even after four years of self-study, night courses, and a Trans-Siberian crossing, I still had to use Russian daily to survive.
I could no longer see English like a regular Canadian.
When I wasn’t teaching English structure, I was speaking broken French with Lucia, the Italian teacher. We talked for hours. Or I was testing out my Russian on strangers. I couldn’t speak “normal” English with anyone.
I was the only one in Voronezh who knew why a British accent might sound pompous, what Bugs Bunny meant when he said, “Nyeh, what’s up, doc?”
I could hear Bronx from Mississippi.
I started to see English as a bubble of words — and myself walking through a world of tongues. I had girlfriends in three languages.
“I love you” meant something different in each one.
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
— Rita Mae Brown
Back home in Canada, things seemed absurdly easy. The supermarket, the bookstore, a notary, a drive-thru… it’s all smooth. You can reinstall Windows or ask for a cold drink without breaking a sweat.
Your tongue just works. The language moves through you.
And English was built for this kind of flexibility.
It doesn't burden us with accents (save the stray umlaut in naïve), and we are spared the tyranny of gendered grammar.
That’s not a small feat.
Most languages require gender awareness with every article and noun. English lets you forget.
We use that mental bandwidth for something else.
English is a patchwork of colonialism, media, missionary zeal, taxonomists, and code.
It was built, over centuries, to describe the future.
Latin gave us the alphabet. Monasteries gave us writing. The computer revolution happened in English. The information age dawned in English.
Even the Cold War fell to it. The internet cracked Soviet barriers wide open.
Sanskrit, like Hebrew, was built with divine intent — but both had to adapt to survive.
Hebrew needed an upgrade.
English was already wired for expansion.
And so, across epochs, English evolved.
A scribe’s language.
A hacker’s language.
A language for space, time, physics, psychology, and memes.
But I can only see it from the outside now.
When I read English, I hear its silence.
When I see the French word blessé, I remember it means wounded.
And I wonder how it became a positive thing in English.
If you throw stale bread at someone, and it hurts them — have you blessed them?
These are the kinds of questions I’ve been asking for forty years.
And the answers, if they exist, are baked into the code of English itself.
It’s the canon of Western expansion.
The fuel of global thinking.
And the one language that never told us when to stop.
“God said: Go forth and multiply.
Evolution never said when to stop.”
English is the most versatile language on Earth because it has no problem stealing.
It borrows everything — syntax, slang, verbs, whole philosophies.
Everyone will speak their native tongue.
And English.
That’s the future.
A broken English.
But a shared one.
I think of Chinese, Vietnamese, Punjabi, and Arabic speakers in Vancouver — immigrants trying to do what I tried to do in Russia.
To survive.
To understand.
To belong.
And now I can empathize.