During his five-months aboard the Russian Space Station Mir, Jerry Linenger grew to love his life as a "spaceman," though it was a difficult and, at times, frightening trip. He has detailed his experiences in a book titled "Off the Planet." Alan Alda met with Linenger recently at home in Michigan.
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Do You Speak Cosmonaut?

Alan: Did you come back fluent in Russian?

Jerry: I had to learn the language, obviously, and learn the technical stuff very well. Just what we're doing now, a little bit of small talk is actually very tough and humor is very tough, I found, up there, because there's a lot of subtlety in humor. They tell a joke and I think sometimes they didn't think I had any sense of humor, you know, because I didn't quite understand. But up in space, we spoke entirely Russian; the two cosmonauts I spent most of the time with only spoke Russian, no English, so I had to speak Russian, obviously. Actually, my little boy can speak pretty good Russian, little John can count up really well, and so it was a good experience for them, I think.

Alan: I remember reading your book, when you went to language school, your professor told you you couldn't learn this is 5 weeks, it would take a year and a half.

Jerry: That's right. He said he'd been teaching it for 40 years and they've tried every shortcut and "Good luck, Captain Linenger learning it in 4-5 weeks when it takes a year and a half." But I showed up in Russia- first day I had a language teacher sitting there and she spoke no English, which was surprising to me. My Russian language teacher spoke no English. She sits there and… you just battle through it. And in the afternoon you're going to technical lectures… space systems, rocket science…

Alan: That must have been especially scary, to go to lectures about stuff you're going to need to know when you're in space and not understand what they're saying. How did you catch up with that?

		Linenger spent two years in Russia at the Cosmonaut Training Center learning about the MIR

Jerry: What I did with the guy was one on one, old fashioned piece of chalk and a blackboard. The guy would write on the blackboard, talk, and I'd just look over his shoulder, because there was a chart back there with the electrical engineering diagram on Mir. I would just memorize the diagram while he's talking at the background. And eventually, probably in about 6 months, I transitioned to where I could understand a lot of the technical language at least, and then I would start learning from him. But I pretty much rote memorized. I had all the electrical wiring diagrams memorized, and that's sort of a universal language. When you think about it, engineering diagrams are the same in Russia as they are here.

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Photos: NASA