How do you say 'junk' in Russian?

If you could learn a language by buying dictionaries, I'd be fluent by now.

Fact is, I'm as much a linguistic basketcase as the rest of America.

That truth was driven home to me over the weekend.

Seized by the kind of burst of enthusiasm that can only be attributed to too much caffeine at my age, I decided it was long past the time to edit the bookshelves at home.

We're in a fall version of spring cleaning at our house at the moment.

Sally's returning to IU this week, so there's sorting and packing to be done. And my wife is embarking on graduate school at Ball State as well, so there's a little bit of that "sweep the cobwebs away and toss out some junk" spirit alive in the land.

If it had struck us a couple of weeks earlier, we could have had one heck of a garage sale during engine show week and might have been able to fill an entire table at the Jay County Public Library's book sale. As it is, I've culled old books from the shelves, but they'll probably sit around for awhile in boxes in the garage.

The nice thing about cleaning up the bookshelves is that you find things you'd forgotten about. And, if you're really feeling the organizational bug, you can cluster certain things together, making them easier to find in the future.

(It's not the Dewey Decimal System, but it's a start.)

For instance, I've become a big fan of the Irish-English author William Trevor. It only makes sense for his books to be together on a bookshelf.

The same holds true of Robertson Davies, a Canadian novelist whose tales grabbed me by the collar decades ago.

And on, and on.

One of the dividends of this type of organizational project is that I was able to gather together on a couple of shelves, the books related to the work I've been doing overseas in the former Soviet Union since 1998.

One shelf holds the homework, background material so that I don't hit the ground as a complete idiot. Another holds Lonely Planet guidebooks, phrasebooks in various languages, and way too many Russian-English/English-Russian dictionaries.

Need a Romanian phrasebook? No problem. We have a dictionary as well.

How about Armenian? Or Georgian? Not a problem.

But, most of all, we have Russian. That's because — thanks to the Russian empire and the Soviet empire — it's still the most common tongue in that part of the world.

By my count, there are four dual-language dictionaries, a vocabulary, and four phrasebooks.

If that's all it took to learn the language, I'd be fluent.

The reality? I know just enough Russian to get myself in trouble.

Right now, I'd estimate my vocabulary at about 100 words, maybe 200. But a good chunk of those have to do with newspapers and journalism. And even more of them are bits and pieces of communication, fragments of a puzzle.

Imagine, for instance, that you're me, listening to a conversation in Russian with my severely limited vocabulary. You hear people talking, and what are they saying? "And," "big," "OK," "very," "little," "four," "please," "two," "but," "how much," "American," "red," "car," and so on.

What are they really talking about?

Your guess is as good as mine. I've learned — sometimes the hard way — not to assume I know what the heck is going on.

As to the dictionaries, I didn't remove any from the shelves.

Do I need four? Of course not.

But, who knows, maybe one of them will make me smarter.

And, at the very least, hanging on to all four of them will remind me never, ever to buy another.[[In-content Ad]]