A post “on” another lesson
I recently posted a Google Ngram to my Instagram comparing “on the lesson,” which most Russians say, to three other options: “at the lesson” “in the lesson,” and “during the lesson.”
A friend/follower pushed back a bit, noting that “on the lesson” was in fact more prominent than one of the other choices, and therefore maybe it’s not be such a bad choice after all….?
My American ears hurt every time I hear someone say “on the lesson,” but I know better than to get too confident with intuition. I wanted to be sure, so I did some more digging.
I checked this expression in Reverso-Context, the translation tool I use most often. If you go from English to Russian, you’ll get results like this:
It looks like “on the lesson” is perfectly valid, right? Look closer, though, and you’ll see that some of the English versions sound odd. That is, they sound like what most Russian students would say:
“…most of the time on the lesson of a foreign language”
Indeed, if you rely on the not-very-good shortcut to translate the preposition “на” as “on,” that’s what you’ll get again and again, end of story.
It’s a really common misconception that there is a 1-to-1 relationship here. Even in my first Russian class, the American instructor taught us this concept. Later, with a smirk wondered aloud why one would ever be “on a stadium,” mocking the rule he just taught us.
Later, in a similar class but taught in Russia by a native speaker, Nina, I learned that the difference was that “в” referred to going to or being in closed spaces while “на” referred to open ones, at least when the words came into use. Therefore, в would apply to going to a building or shop, but на would apply to a yard or a market.
This makes much more sense, but is still not all that relevant when it comes to “translating,” and more importantly, justifying my meme.
So I consulted a different source.
I landed on ludwig.guru, an AI language tool, and found more promising results.
It went on to list several examples from American news sources. The meanings all show the same pattern (or rather don’t show the same pattern):
Here, “on” is a part of the phrasal verb “carry on,” not a preposition regarding place.
Again, “on” is part of a phrasal verb and does not denote place.
Here, “on” does denote place, but it refers to a place on a “spectrum” where “lesson” is an adjective, not a noun.
Here, the noun that something is “on” is a lesson plan, not a class.
Another phrasal verb: we need to understand the lesson, not a classroom experience.
It’s clear that in none of these examples does “on” refer to the physical time and place where a lesson occurred.
The results from my initial Ngram chart were a little misleading because they were devoid of context. Relying on just such a tool can lead even data-hungry learners astray.
I hope it’s now clear that to express that idea of attending a lesson, being in a classroom, etc. “on” won’t do.
Your best bets are…well, you get the idea.
