![]() "The astronauts often complained of insufficient language training, and all agreed that better Russian proficiency was necessary for safe operations on the Mir," she told by email. She wrote a 2012 Space Policy paper exploring the merits of an international language in space. The NASA astronauts participating in Mir in the 1990s had varying levels of language training, and tended to do better with more exposure to Russian, said Megan Ansdell, a postdoctoral fellow in planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. For about six months, I felt like a small child," she said in an interview published on NASA's website. For her first six months of training, although "you knew the answer, you didn't know how to say it in Russian. Former NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar also described the difficulties of learning Russian as she prepared to live on Russia's Mir space station. Denmark's first astronaut, Andreas Mogensen, once said that learning Russian was his biggest challenge as he trained for an International Space Station mission. That compares to between 575 and 600 hours for languages such as French, Spanish, Dutch and Afrikaans.Įven astronauts speak about the Russian language's difficulty. To reach a reasonable level of fluency in Russian, students can expect to spend 1,100 class hours - plus many hours of individual study time. The department ranks Russian among several "Category II" languages, such as Greek, Icelandic and Croatian, with "significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English. State Department's Foreign Service Institute has a scale for English speakers to understand the difficulty of learning another language.
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