Ana-Maria Georgieva

Ana-Maria Georgieva is a recipient of the Summer 2016 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. The award provides undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students with financial support to develop fluency in less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) and expertise in the regions in which these languages are spoken. Every year the Center for Global Studies awards between 12-15 fellowships to UW students. Click here to learn more.

It is important for me to say that the length of this paragraph would not be enough to encompass the intellectual satisfaction that my second year of Russian class taken in the summer of 2016 has brought me.

The course in Russian has not only sensibly enriched my level of comprehension and command of speaking basic Russian but it has further illustrated the subtle semantic ‘diapason’ of the Russian vocabulary. Moreover, having studied Latin in the past, aided me in making more educated connections between the Church-Slavonic roots and their transition into English. Learning the meaning of various basic roots of Russian words also benefitted my personal understanding of my native Bulgarian language, as a stem of the Proto-Slavic family; i.e., the similarities and differences between certain roots and their mutations. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my professor -Valentina Zaitzeva, who has made this course absolutely compelling and exhaustive in content for this compressed summer term. For my success first and foremost I would like to thank the generous contributors of the FLAS scholarship who made this experience possible! I recommend everyone to apply and get advantage of this precious opportunity to dive into a foreign language and learn how to swim in it!