I finally managed to finish working on the transcription of Baba Anya's story with her this evening. It was really hard going. She would not give me her full attention. She wanted to sort berries out. So I sat down with her outside while she did that. But she gave me very divided attention and would often talk to other people while I was trying to ask her questions.
Translating the text into Russian also proved challenging. She continually wanted to translate phrases, and really struggled to understand that I wanted a word for word translation. It was also very difficult asking her to confirm where breaks came between words in her oral text. As challenging as those tasks were it was close to impossible to get a description from her about grammatical features such as suffixes and infixes. I decided not to push that, and hope that I can work with this same text and others with Sergei back in Krasnoyarsk.
I hope that Baba Anya wants to continue sharing her language with me. This last task has been a bit boring for her, but highly valuable for me. Baba made a comment to Melody that I could at least ask her about some phrases. I will do that next. It's really hard sometimes explaining to an old person what I am trying to do.
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