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Kazan State Language Professor Soaks Up American Culture at UAlbany

Students coming to classes in pajamas shocked her. She could not get over all the people walking around carrying bottles and she is likely to be telling friends at home about how Americans go around smiling.

Dr. Ziyatdinova with UAlbany students

Home is a long way from Albany for Julia Ziyatdinova, 31, head of the Department of Foreign Languages in Professional Communications at Kazan State Technological University in Tatarstan, part of the Russian Federation. For about a month in March and April she traveled through the U.S. on a grant from her government to study cross-cultural communication, language acquisition, distance learning and educational administration. Ziyatdinova, who holds a Ph.D. in education planned three stops at State University of New York campuses in Albany, Geneseo and Canton.

Her first trip to the U.S., or to any English-speaking country, after nine years of lessons at an English specialized school in Kazan, Ziyatdinova began soaking up sounds and culture from the minute she landed in New York City. She eavesdropped on conversations in the airport, she confessed, to see if she could understand them. "I learned," she said, "it is not polite to overhear people's conversations."

She got more language practice at UAlbany, lecturing to Russian history students about her homeland and good-naturedly submitting to a news conference with beginning journalism students. She told them with glee at one point that she realized she was thinking in English, coming up with answers to their questions without first translating their words back and forth from Russian, her native tongue and one of three languages she knows.

Dr. Ziyatdinova

But that doesn't mean she understood everything about what was going on around her. "Americans are always chewing, drinking or eating something," she said, with a nod to the lecture center concourse where students streamed by pulling at coffee, water and soda bottles. Her mother would have disciplined her for that kind of behavior, she said with a laugh.

Her parents also would have had a word or two with the loud, rowdy young people she encountered on bus rides around the city. People at home, she said, were more polite and also more reliant on mass transit.

"All people drive here," she marveled. And more, the city is set up for drivers and not pedestrians. She set out to find Crossgates Mall seeing how close it is to campus on a map but found there were no sidewalks and few signs. She took a bus. "There is no way for pedestrians to walk," she said.

But she has had mostly pleasant surprises, she said. Having heard so much about the American fast-food diet of hamburgers and fries that was making everyone fat, she was thrilled to find salads, soups and an array of healthy food in the Patroon Room. And Chinese restaurants in the city.

Albany, she found was more diverse than Kazan, a mixed city of Russian and Tatar citizens and now largely Muslim. "It is good that people show their culture here," she said.

And it is oddly cleaner than home, less dusty, she told the students. She wiped her boots one morning, walked all around for much of the day and found at night that they were still shiny.

She also couldn't help noticing the friendliness. Everyone smiles here, she said. "It is an American tradition, I think." People are more open, she said, willing to talk openly about things like divorce that would be disgraceful in Kazan to bring up.

The professor was not offended that the friendly UAlbany students knew so little of her oil-rich homeland which was a booming trade state as far back as 700. It has been part of what we know as Russia since Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible conquered it in the 1550s.

UAlbany has a bond with Tatarstan through shared interest in nanotechnology. Last year some 17 Tatarstan students were enrolled in Albany taking courses.

Ziyatdinova recounted some of that long history, which she said, she has learned from textbooks and from her own family history. She also gamely spoke to students in Tatar to let them hear the sound of her home.

Cross-cultural communication is her field, after all. Back in Kazan, the single mother is teaching her 2-year-old daughter English already by reading her bedtime stories in that language. She has "Come" and "Moon" down pat, the mother said.

By Veronica Lewin, Nina Ansanelli, Amanda Baskind and Alexandra Stevens contributed to this story. Photos are by Baoying (Aimee) Huang.

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