"This has worked, but led to concerns about safety and efficiency/costs of station operations due to reliance on translators at mission control centers. But having two ISS languages brings operational inefficiencies, Ansdell said. The situation is much better for today's NASA astronauts, who receive years of training in Russian and even participate in home stays with Russian families to become more familiar with the language. "Another issue was communication with ground crews, which only spoke English or Russian this led to operational inefficiencies, such as the need to repeat multiple communications with ground crew or miscommunication of information when working through translators." "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. Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin.The U.S. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where both people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen. Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode… Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it? And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia.
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