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.
The only way to understand a Russian city was to immerse myself. What was meant to be left at home, I left. What I brought, I brought fully. That was living abroad.
Teaching was a challenge. Some days I had all the answers. Other days were so baffling even my personal math didn’t add up. But my worst day teaching in Russia was still better than some of my best days back home.
One snowy evening, I walked home at dusk and stopped in Lenin Square. There, I stood alone before the statue of Lenin, snow falling, his arm outstretched as if still giving orders. I wondered if he had ever imagined someone like me in his vision—a Canadian English teacher in a free, so to speak, Russian republic under yet another tyrant. I crunched off into the snow.
In class, I used to tell students that English was a “bastard language”—a hodgepodge of nouns and verbs adopted from distant lands. But that view faded. I realized that English is structurally rich and nearly universally versatile. I learned its depth while I was teaching it.
Working through photocopied workbooks, I discovered things about my own native tongue. I’d underestimated the attention span of language learners. English, it turned out, was not just a set of rules; it was an intentional structure built to carry ideas, unify cultures, and stand the test of global utility.
“Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery.”
— Amy Chua
Tatyana, a second-year professor, would sometimes throw curveballs—asking me to walk the class through past perfect tense, contractions, or even non-Euclidean grammar. My interest in languages kept me afloat through what might otherwise have been overwhelming.
I often learned the lessons the night before—or right there in class. One evening, a student named Nastya rang my bell and asked if I could help her “check her passive voice.” And that night, I learned it too.
We take language for granted. We use it without reverence. We skim across English’s surface, rarely diving into the deep waters of its history.
On a Canadian street, someone might beg for change using an impressive command of participles, tenses, and declensions—without ever recognizing the linguistic mastery they’re demonstrating. English can express almost any nuance a human mind can invent. Other languages run out of road.
As someone who taught English from beginner to advanced levels at schools and universities in Russia, China, and Iraq, I came to understand something: some people acquire a functional level of English very quickly—and they’re content to stay there. It becomes a working tool, not a passion. Others, though, never stop climbing. They hunger for subtlety, humor, and metaphor. I had to teach both types in the same classroom.
In Russia, my language was the golden ring. Students hung on every word. They craved the carelessness with which native English speakers speak. From movie titles to road signs, English governed modern life. We native speakers didn’t even see it anymore.
But they saw it. They wanted the dialect, the slang, the rhythm. Every scribbled word on the chalkboard was a code they had to crack—to surf websites, understand movies without mismatched lips, or work as air traffic controllers. To them, English wasn’t optional. It was essential.
Outside class, I was the student. Buying a drink, getting bread, or exchanging nods with the university president in the men’s room—all demanded Russian. That alone made every day an adventure. “Good morning” in Russian came ten times a day, and I loved every interaction.
I stood out. I was such an oddity in Voronezh that old Soviet-era residents stopped me on the street to ask for proof that I was Canadian. They hadn’t seen a foreigner since the Germans in ’45.
Everything was in Russian—everything. It’s an alphabet that looks cryptic and mystical to outsiders: 33 letters, 21 consonants, 10 vowels, two soundless glyphs—10 Greek, 10 Latin-based, and 10 distinctly Russian.
“Я случайно… Русский язык очень сложный для изучения, но оно того стоит…”
Translation: “I think Russian is a difficult language to learn. But it’s worth it.”
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
— Charlemagne
Learning Russian revealed to me how difficult language acquisition really is. The unfamiliar word order, the shifting stresses, the grammar-gender landmines—they mirrored the struggles I saw in my students.
Later, I lived in Estonia and watched as Soviet Russian signage was taken down in waves of independence. Estonian is written in Roman script, but it’s tough and obscure. Russian, by contrast, seemed like a secret doorway. After four years of self-study, night classes, and a journey across Siberia, I still had to work at it. Russian wasn’t a language I learned—it was one I lived.
Back in Voronezh, English no longer felt native. My inner monologue now worked across three systems: English, Russian, and broken French. Lucia, the Italian teacher, and I used French as our mutual fallback. Hours of late-night conversations in fractured French helped me feel more grounded, even as English receded.
I was the only person in Voronezh who understood why a British accent could sound pompous, what Bugs Bunny meant by “What’s up, Doc?” or how to distinguish a Bronx drawl from Mississippi slang.
English became a floating bubble of words in my head. I was walking through a world of tongues. I’d said “I love you” to three different women in three different languages, and I meant it three different ways.
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
— Rita Mae Brown
I thought about life back in Canada—the supermarket, the bookstore, the drive-thru. How easy it all was. Watching a movie, reinstalling software, asking for a cold cup to pour your too-hot drink into—these were effortless acts of linguistic luxury.
English speakers are spared so many hurdles. No diacritical marks. No grammatical genders. We have silent letters, sure, but they’re more curiosity than burden. We can understand broken English from anywhere.
And yet, that ease hides something sacred. The language is stronger for its lack of formalities. It borrows without guilt. It adapts. It survives.
English is a product of empires and revolutions, monasteries and dot-com startups. It dominated the Cold War through media. It cracked open the East when the internet arrived. It’s the scaffolding of globalization.
Languages like Sanskrit, beautiful but brittle, can’t evolve easily. Hebrew needed reviving to rejoin the modern world. And during the dot-com boom, English stretched itself to create new identity words—words that now carry price tags on digital domains.
Across centuries, English became the best language for describing the future. The Latin alphabet is sacred. The internet began in English. And English still dominates the global corpus.
But now, I can only see it from the outside.
When I read or speak English, I hear its strangeness. I notice how “bless” in French means to wound, to injure—an eerie twist. If you throw a stale loaf of bread at someone, and it hits them, technically… you’ve blessed them.
I’ve found this kind of wordplay fascinating for forty years. I believe the scribes left breadcrumbs—clues, not accidents. The language carries ancient secrets. It got us here. But it never told us when to stop.
God said, “Go forth and multiply.”
Evolution never said when to quit.
English is the most versatile language in the world because it steals. It absorbs. It evolves.
I wrote an article once arguing that everyone in the future will speak two languages: their native tongue and English. And not perfect English—broken English. Functional, shared, hybrid English. The lingua franca of the messy global village.
You can read it here.
Now, when I walk around Vancouver, I see immigrants wrestling with the same struggles I faced. Chinese, Vietnamese, East Indian—each of them trying to decode a world not built for them.
And at last, I can empathize.