I can have you speaking Russian in three minutes

That's my cheap party trick where I teach all comers that “da” means yes and “nyet” means no. I don't promise to take them farther since scaling that strange and beautiful language is like climbing Mt. Everest. I am not fluent in Russian—my ace is an authentic accent, one that fools Russians everywhere. That picture of me on the blog was taken at the dock in Vladivostok. Our guide said, “your mother is from Russia”. Nyet, she was from Halifax. All the credit goes to UCLA and my wonderful teacher Prof. Alexander Mornell who tragically died during our class! Of course I can read the language but I saw something in the paper this week that gave me pause. At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum there was a word 20 letters long ending with a pronunciation “sign”. It meant “competitiveness”. Russian has a much larger alphabet than English as well as two pronunciation signs. Homer Simpson got tossed out of a costume party and the host yelled after him: “I was going to make you a Russian Count”. And Homer replied. “Well, as they say in Russia, Goodbye!..in Russian. He meant “Dos vi danya”. Try it.