The documentary Life on the Atomic River, a film by Slawomir Grunberg and Slava Paperno about the human and environmental tragedy of the villages near the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, was produced by Lexicon Bridge Publishers with the aim of creating a contemporary tool for learners of Russian. The footage used in this documentary was not filmed specifically for language learners. It was filmed for Slawomir Grunberg's Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet, a television documentary that won the Grand Prix at the International Nature and Environment Film Festival in Grenoble, France. The film also won the Best of the Environment Award at the Vermont International Film Festival in Vermont, USA and the Journalistic Achievement Award at the International Ecological Film Festival in Frieburg, Germany.

However, Lexicon Bridge Publishers' Life on the Atomic River, produced after another trip by Slava Paperno and Slawomir Grunberg to Chelyabinsk, Russia, was edited with the language learner in mind: for this film, we created short, self-contained scenes, organizing them into clear thematic sequences, and we used no music or sound effects that might complicate listening to speech.

The language of film includes many communication channels in addition to speech. When the dialogue is foreign, these channels are especially precious: a film can tell the learner more than a book. In a scripted film, speech is often absent for long stretches of time. A documentary, on the other hand, is mostly focused on speech.

Ideas and messages in a scripted film are filtered through the artist's imagination: in fiction, information is not the most valuable part. In a documentary, ideas and messages are presented for their own sake. The viewers strive to understand them so they can think about them and perhaps discuss them with other people. Isn't that what a language learner always wants to do?

They speak excellent Russian. It is contemporary, natural, unscripted and unstilted, and most importantly, it reflects the personalities and backgrounds of real people. Some are educated and use short-form adjectives in their predicates. Others are uneducated and use words like нљту and боїлися. From both groups you will hear unfinished sentences, jumbled word order, meaningless conversational fillers... the works—just what you need to hear when learning Russian as it is spoken in Russia.

You don't need them. We don't like them. Exercises are haphazard collections of disjointed ideas. That's not how we think, and that's not how we learn. Exercises make you concentrate on the technical aspects of a sentence. When was the last time you filled-in-the-blanks in real life? Probably when working on a form in a doctor's office. Was it a learning experience?

Everything. They are good only for tests and exams, and we're not testing you.

No. We don't learn a language by memorizing lists. We learn by processing and producing sentences and paragraphs, i.e. by thinking. And we learn best when we really want to understand a story or an idea and to talk about it. This documentary is full of ideas and stories, and they are all real and relevant (and mostly tragic). There's a lot to learn and think about. Go ahead.

Start by playing a scene, watching, and listening, but do not try to understand every word. If you get just a few words on your first viewing, that's fine. Get the general idea and, of course, absorb the scene.

Next, read the transcript. Don't click every word to see what they all mean. Not every word is crucial. Click only the words that seem essential. Once you get to the next level of understanding, watch the scene again.

Then go back to the transcript and click the words that hold the clues to the details you may still be missing. Watch again a couple of times until you can easily hear almost every word and follow the meaning of every sentence as it is spoken.

If you are lucky enough to have a companion or a group you can discuss these scenes with, be sure to do just that. Telling someone what you have learned about the people in a scene is fun and an important learning step. Enjoy!