I arrived at Pulkovo Airport two weeks ago with my boyfriend Rich, who is as American as an apple pie baked into the shape of a baseball and then fired out of a concealed handgun. He and I waltzed through passport check with nary a raised eyebrow from the control officers. I ordered us a cab to the hotel entirely in Russian, and as a result was feeling pretty much like the Queen of Russia. (Sorry, tsaritsa.)

I can break down the ensuing things that went wrong into roughly three Rumsfeldian categories:

1) Words I did not know that I did not know.

2) Words I knew I did not know, and would never remember.

3) Words I did not know, and would later remember, but it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Research shows that trying to remember words in a foreign language improves brain function because it exercises things like task-switching and working memory. I guess the silver lining of what I experienced is that I’m now probably 800 percent smarter.

One:

We're sitting in a cafe with my cousin, who has lived in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg her entire life. She is offering Rich more food. He says, “I’m full” in English, and I try to teach him the words for “I’m full” in Russian, because I enjoy feeling smarter than others.

“Sut,” I say—full—remembering a word from childhood refusals to eat more buckwheat kasha. There’s no English letter for the “u” sound there, but it resembles the noise you’d make if you experienced a tremendous blow to the stomach.

“Sit,” he says.

“Sut.”

“Sit.”

I look at my cousin, who is turning red. “Actually,” she tells me in Russian, “that word can mean something else.”

Apparently the word I had been broadcasting to the entire restaurant is prison slang for “pissing from fright.”

“Ya nayelsa,” my cousin tells Rich gently. I have eaten enough.

Two:

In the mornings, me and my dozen or so Russian nouns and verbs are like an eager dogsled team, under-provisioned but scrappy. We mush all day through get-togethers with distant relatives and family friends, nobly running a race we know we probably can’t win. This palace is “ochen krasivoy” (very beautiful) but this painting is “ochen intersniy” (very interesting). Repeat as needed.

The author in a palace, confused. (Richard Seymour)

I was surprised how exhausting it can be to operate in an unfamiliar tongue. By the end of the day, my word-dogs and I yearned to stop. I would run out of things to deem “beautiful” or “interesting.” My tongue felt fat, and my already half-assedly rolled “rs” started getting straight-up swapped for the American kind.

As the psychologist Francois Grosjean points out, learning and forgetting a language are two sides of the same mental process, but people tend to be much prouder of the former than the latter. "People who are in an extended process of forgetting a language avoid using it because they no longer feel sure about it and they do not want to make too many mistakes," Grosjean wrote recently. "If they do have to use it, they may cut short a conversation so as not to have to show openly how far the attrition has progressed."