FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6866 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
| Message 25 of 37 12 April 2007 at 4:44am | IP Logged |
Jerrod wrote:
Iversen wrote:
I don't see the Russian vocabulary as a big problem. I have just started to learn Russian, and I have chosen the unconventional method of working my way through the dictionary from А to Я (I'm at Г right now) as one of the key ingredients of my study. The thing that has struck me most is the immense proportion of loanwords from Western European languages, not least German and French. It must be at least half the words you get for free that way, if not more. I'm more concerned about just about every other aspect of the Russian language than the vocabulary. |
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Iversen, I am interested in your approach. How many words from each letter are you learning? May I suggest you work your way through the 5000 most common words of Russian? They have an alphabetical version on their site. I am thinking about this approach with Spanish and would like to see what the results would be.
You mention that there are a great deal of German and French loan words. I am not sure what language to do next (though leaning toward Spanish), do you think my knowledge of Russian would help me learn one of these two languages faster? If so, which one?
Thanks. |
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I have tried this with Spanish.
At first I tried going through the dictionary and to be honest found it very boring and un-rewarding.
What I started to do instead was look at materials that interested me (e.g. online news articles), and as new words emerged, made flash cards for them. I also bought a lexical frequency dictionary with the 5,000 most common Spanish words in it, and used this to double check if the new words I'de found were common. If so, I put a little index number in the top corner of the card.
About 3-6 months later, I have 80-90% comprehension for written Spanish and about 60% comprehension for listening.
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zoshchenko Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6441 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Georgian, Turkish
| Message 26 of 37 26 April 2007 at 6:35pm | IP Logged |
If you are still interested in learning Polish, there is an interesting program from Transparent Language which is sort of a visual phrase book. You can look at pictures and click on things to hear the word, or click on other things to see a dialog or click on other things to go to a different place and have new things to click on.
It's different. I won't give the web site since this is enough of a plug already (no, I dont work for them). It is actually some kind of British-Russian program being marketed by Transparent Language. Look for LinguaMatch, Panoramic Polish, or Doka.
The documentation is kinda crappy. Actually there is none. So you have to just kinda play with it.
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teddo Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 6411 days ago 22 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English, Polish Studies: French
| Message 27 of 37 09 May 2007 at 3:03pm | IP Logged |
I advise you of course Polish from one important reason - it has LATIN alphabet which is the most widely used alphabetic writting system in the world today, and when you will know Polish then learning Russian will be banal. 2 in 1!
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matryoshka Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5737 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: Russian, Polish*
| Message 28 of 37 17 March 2009 at 12:07am | IP Logged |
Luigi wrote:
Silvestris wrote:
Sorry, not meaning to hijack this thread but how hard would it be for
someone (like me) who grew up speaking Polish, to learn Russian?
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If you already speak Polish, then learning Russian will be easy. You are very lucky in this respect.
In the following site you will find a complete two-year college course, the quality of which seams exceptional.
Why don't you try a few lessons to get a feeling of the language?
http://www.princeton.edu/russian/ |
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I've tried this link and it is currently not working...
??? :(
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jandem Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 5730 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Russian
| Message 29 of 37 19 March 2009 at 2:35pm | IP Logged |
matryoshka wrote:
I've tried this link and it is currently not working...
??? :( |
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You can find it here: http://www.freela nguagecourses.com/language/russian/princeton-russian-course- 51/ (as a big ZIP-file). They only ask you to send an email to the author with some information about yourself.
Good luck!
edit: Unfortunately, the link is broken to discourage spammers. Just remove the space/spaces and it should work...
Edited by jandem on 19 March 2009 at 2:40pm
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Olekander Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5884 days ago 122 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, French, Russian
| Message 30 of 37 19 March 2009 at 6:46pm | IP Logged |
orion wrote:
Another consideration, albeit a small one, is that Polish uses the Latin alphabet. I still find it relatively slow going when reading Cyrillic text, as Russian uses. Both are cool languages though. Good luck! |
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Hell no, I find it so much easier reading russian in the Cyrillic alphabet than the Polish languge in the Latin one. Polish is designed for the Cyrillic alphabet.
wzydezydiy / взедезыдий
definitely for the russian there.
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 31 of 37 19 March 2009 at 10:49pm | IP Logged |
Olekander wrote:
orion wrote:
Another consideration, albeit a small one, is that Polish uses the Latin alphabet. I still find it relatively slow going when reading Cyrillic text, as Russian uses. Both are cool languages though. Good luck! |
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Hell no, I find it so much easier reading russian in the Cyrillic alphabet than the Polish languge in the Latin one. Polish is designed for the Cyrillic alphabet.
wzydezydiy / взедезыдий
definitely for the russian there. |
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Really? Saying that Polish is designed for the Cyrillic alphabet has the same value to me as saying that Ukrainian is designed for Latin alphabet.
See this thread for the discussion here about Cyrillic versus Latin.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=9431&PN=3
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stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5833 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin
| Message 32 of 37 19 March 2009 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
Olekander wrote:
orion wrote:
Another consideration, albeit a small one, is that Polish uses the Latin alphabet. I still find it relatively slow going when reading Cyrillic text, as Russian uses. Both are cool languages though. Good luck! |
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Hell no, I find it so much easier reading russian in the Cyrillic alphabet than the Polish languge in the Latin one. Polish is designed for the Cyrillic alphabet.
wzydezydiy / взедезыдий
definitely for the russian there. |
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What an earth do these two words mean?
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