Rooskee Yazeek

Fio will admit that she screamed "Dummkopf!" at Stephen Colbert last night when he mispronounced the Russian word for "Thank you." She loves her languages, especially Russian with its wonderful "zh's" and "kv's" and "rrrrr's." She hasn't retained very much of it, and she could never have carried on a conversation in it, even in her third year, because translation of a written text was the teaching emphasis back then. Maybe a fourth year would have helped, but the Linguistics Department at UT required two semesters of a non-Indo-European language, which meant Fio had to drop Russian and take up Telegu. Fio grew to love Telegu too, especially because, like with the rooskyy yazeek, she had to learn a new and different script. But again, she has lost most of the language. If you don't use it, you lose it.

And, by the way, "dummkopf" is German (Deutsch), which Fiorella had one glorious semester of.