Columnist Learned Russian through Rock Music

From http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20120618/174100608.html

Deeper Than Oil: Russian Rock Lessons
Marc Bennett
June 18, 2012

When I first arrived in Russia in the late 1990s, knowing barely a word of the language, I found it a bore to wade through study books as I attempted to get beyond “da” and “nyet.” But if teach-yourself-Russian was a pain, my attempts to decipher the words of the country’s rock stars were much more enjoyable.

The two groups that aided my Russian most back then were Kino, whose ethnic Korean singer Viktor Tsoi sang simple songs centered on themes containing useful vocabulary like “night,” “kitchen” and “rain.”

Tsoi was great for getting to grips with the basics, but for a more advanced course in what they call here “the great and all-powerful Russian language,” I turned to the folk-rock group Akvarium, and the philosophical lyrics of their singer-songwriter Boris Grebenshchikov.

And it turned out that Grebenshchikov had also had his own musical teachers of English – the Beatles.

Read the full article at http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20120618/174100608.html