In the late 1980s, after I had settled into my job at a factory, I started looking for something new to learn. I wanted an intellectual challenge. One day, I came across a Japanese self-study book by Lavrentiev. I picked it up and began studying right away.
At that time in Yekaterinburg, there were no Japanese language courses, no recordings, and no native speakers around to ask for help. I had to guess how the words sounded and focus mainly on reading and writing. Still, I found the process fascinating and began collecting whatever Japanese materials I could find.
I searched bookstores for dictionaries and textbooks. When I traveled to Moscow or Leningrad, I always made time to visit second-hand bookshops. By the early 1990s, I had built a unique personal library of Japanese learning materials — books, dictionaries, and later, audio tapes.
What drew me in most was the Japanese writing system. It includes about 2,500 kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese) and two simpler alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Each kanji had its own shape, meaning, and reading. Figuring them out felt like solving a puzzle — like doing codebreaking.
After a few months of studying, I finished the Lavrentiev book and tried translating texts. Right before the May holidays, I asked the factory’s translation department for something to work on. I spent the holidays translating a document, and the result was good enough to be accepted.
Not long after, the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry gave me more work. Japanese paid twice as much as English, which was a nice bonus. I continued improving and moved on to technical and scientific texts. I even bought an electric typewriter and learned to touch type to speed up the work.
While I was writing my PhD dissertation, I kept translating part-time — often on chemical topics, which I found especially interesting.
Two important things happened around that time that helped me progress further. In 1989, a Japanese language class opened at the Polyglot Center in Yekaterinburg. The teacher, Tsvetkov, wasn’t a trained instructor, but he knew the language well. His lessons helped me improve a lot.
Then, in 1990, a group of Japanese students came to study Russian at Ural State University. I quickly became friends with some of them. We spoke Japanese and Russian together, helping each other learn. Talking to native speakers gave me a big boost in conversational skills.
By the early 1990s, I wasn’t just learning the language — I had become part of a growing group of people in Yekaterinburg interested in Japan and its culture. My Japanese skills opened up real job opportunities, especially in translation. They also prepared me for future work with Japanese companies.
What started as a personal challenge turned into a useful and rewarding path. In those days, studying a language like Japanese in Russia wasn’t easy. But with curiosity and persistence, I made it work — and it ended up shaping part of my career.