Language practice with fairy tales
Practicing the language with the help of fairy tales is useful, interesting and entertaining. You will find yourself smiling while reading fairy tales. Why? Fairy tales contain a certain set of values accepted by the people since antiquity. They say that the soul of the people is visible in fairy tales. So, in order to understand the people better, it is useful to read their tales.
Fairy tales are loved because the language in which they are written is parable, does not judge anyone, but simply describes thoughts and actions, how they began, how it all happened, and how it ended, leaving the reader or listener to draw their own conclusions.
Fairy tales are written in the same manner in which the Holy Scriptures are written, Jesus Christ spoke to the people in parables. The language of fairy tales awakens symbolic thinking, which embraces intuition, logic, sense of relationship, emotions. All together - a natural model of perception of life lessons.
Throughout the history of mankind, children have been taught through fairy tales and stories told them by their elders. It is
genetically natural for a person to learn the language of the people through fairy tales. This tradition changed somewhat in the 20th century of industrialization and ideology. However, in itself, the tendency to speak in parables did not leave the people. The best publicists, even in the 20th century, wrote in the style of the same parable, telling in "simple symbolic language."
On the other hand, there has been a shift away from the use of tales in education in schools. There are reasons for this. Many tales were retelling of the lives of saints. For example, many thought that the tale about Ilya of Murom was a fairy tale, while this is the real story of the life of St. Ilya of Murom.
Fairy tales that remained officially available in Russian into the 20th century are often a throwback to paganism, where we see talking stoves and talking apple trees, and witchcraft. Such fairy tales cannot in any way claim to fulfill the function of supporting the core of values accepted by the people during the thousand years of Orthodoxy.
It is not at all clear to us how exactly a talking stove, or even a talking flea, can teach us how to solve human problems today. The ability to negotiate with the gray wolf also looks a bit ambiguous. Therefore, what was published in the 20th century under the official title of Russian fairy tales is now almost never used even for small children. Some exceptions are Krylov's fables and Pushkin's fairy tales, which were included in the school curriculum.
However, it must be remembered that Krylov was a highly educated person, he took the old Greek fairy tales of Aesop and turned them into a poetic fable in Russian. Thus, the continuity of the cultural heritage of mankind was maintained.
Pushkin's fairy tales are good, first of all, from the aesthetic side. These are large, independent, full-fledged, unique works in verse. Pushkin's fairy tales are the author's works of a talented intelligent person, they are not like any other fairy tales.
As a result, in the 20th and 21st centuries, through the rejection of authentic folk tales, we get a blurring of the folk code of values about how love is manifested, what are the virtues of honesty in words and deeds.
The fairy tales published in Russia after perestroika have several tendencies: they are attempts to restore the traditions of the Orthodox parable-like story about life, attempts to return what was rejected by atheists, as well as attempts to write new fairy tales - like “The Stories of Smeshariki” and therapeutic fairy tales.
Also, ancient traditions remain in the people's memory, the meaning of which is not entirely clear now. However, as soon as people start learning foreign languages, they discover cultural continuity and discover a world that is different from the official one.
This applies not only to descriptions of the life of the saints and wise, but also to descriptions related to the traditions of the Nativity. For example, not many people know that the word "kutia" means a dish that is prepared on Christmas Eve in Russia, but it came from the life of the first undivided Church, from Sicily. Because of the wheat disease, people starved and prayed to the holy martyr Lucia, who lived in Sicily. After prayers, a ship with clean grain arrived to the starving people, which they simply boiled and ate with oil, not even having the strength to grind this grain. In Sicilian, this boiled grain was called cuchia (cucia), and the corresponding dish is still cooked in Sicily on the feast day of St. Lucia - shortly before Christmas. How did this tradition end up in Russia? Most likely, through the legends about the saints, heard in the church and told by grandmothers to their grandchildren. There are many other cases when the code of honor of the people is transmitted through fairy tales, which is still relevant and necessary for a happy and successful life today.
On our website, we do not offer fairy tales with pagan motives, a departure from the principles of the natural fulfillment of love in human relationships. Instead, we offer fairy tales that represent the millennia and centuries of succession of the best in people. We do not always offer Russian fairy tales in blog section “Russian Practice”. In the blog section “English Practice”, the same fairy tale is placed with a phrase-by-phrase translation and voice acting. Fairy tales are also given with translation under the headings “Italian Practice” and “Serbian Practice”.
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Russian in fairy tales
