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Do you find russian words hard to stick ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4389 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 1 of 40 07 April 2014 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been working with assimil on and off over the past months , now I am at lesson 81 , I generally
never try to learn words by heart ,I have never done that, I usually learn words exposing myself to the same content for a certain number of times ,which varies .this has worked out fine with German and I am convinced of the effectiveness of this method . That was just a little preface to give you the chance of better understanding my situation . I am under the impression that russian words are harder to stick ,most of them seem to me unnaturally complicated , I have not had this feeling while learning German , or at least to a way smaller degree. I must say that I am not entirely sure why this feeling has originated . It could also be because I haven 't been very consistent or because assimil is pretty boring and provides you also with lots of words that aren't very meaningful for a biginner ,but it could simply be that russian words are simply harder for someone without a slavic background , I am curious to know your experience in this regard , have you felt the same ? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4254 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 40 07 April 2014 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have found that Russian words stick with me very well, with my approach.
I recommend that you start looking at the words not as these mammoths but like this: Let's take the Russian word "современный"; "modern, contemporary" and as you can see, both "contemporary" and "современный" are comprised of similar blocks: con- with; -tempo- time; -rary adjective ending со- with; -времен- time; -ный adjective ending I can say with relative confidence that about 4/5 of large words in Russian can be broken like this which makes them easier to understand in my opinion. Further reading: Roots of the Russian Language - An Elementary Guide of Wordbuilding (George Z. Patrick) 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4389 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 3 of 40 07 April 2014 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
Edited by albysky on 07 April 2014 at 1:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 40 07 April 2014 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Quoting myself from a different thread:
That was of course Mandarin, but for someone with a background of Italian, English and German, I'd wager the same phenomenon happens in Russian. It's not a specific feature of russian, but a feature of learning a language with a very unfamiliar set of phonemes. It'll get easier with time. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 5 of 40 07 April 2014 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I've had this problem. I think there are a few reasons. First, unlike German and Italic languages, the shared stock of words roots between most of the languages in those families and Russian is far less. You're often starting from scratch.
Second, Cyrillic is alien and just doesn't seem to stick as well in my head. When I hear an English word, my mind produces an almost photographically clear picture of the word spelled out. With Cyrillic, in my mind's eye, I just see a bunch of fierce looking scribbles, or, sometimes, a rendition into Latin letters. Remembering Hungarian words is easier, even though they're even less likely to be cognates, because I can more easily remember spelling using a known alphabet. Third, the phonotactics are significantly different. If you were trying to remember a word in Italian, you'd know, if nothing else, that it's not going to start with [stv]. But with Russian, you've got to be ready for that. I find writing words out or spelling them aloud helps the process. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 6 of 40 07 April 2014 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Are you using the most modern Assimil Russian course by any chance, "Russian" With Ease Series, with 100 lessons? My personal experience with this course so far is that a lot of the vocabulary doesn't get repeated in lessons as often as it does in some of the older Assimil courses. I've had to put in a lot more time and effort into reviewing old lessons to remember vocabulary with this course.
Whereas using the old Le Russe Sans Peine course a lot of the vocabulary pops up more frequently and I've needed to do less review to get everything to stick. One advantage of the most modern Assimil course though is that a lot of the dialogs are humorous and have a logical set up before the punchline. I've found that this makes it easier for me to review the lessons without the textbook. I can simply listen to the audio or blind shadow it, and if I remember the joke, I can often figure out unknown words just through context, which is a much easier way to review sometimes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5190 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 7 of 40 08 April 2014 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I like the way Memrise encourages you to create "mems", mnemonics comprised of pictures and words, for as many words as you care to. I have probably created a few hundred on my way to knowing the first 1000 Russian words. I do think it speeds up the SRS learning process by using more areas of the brain. A good mem can be funny, absurd or stupid, but it doesn't have to last forever - it just bridges the gap between when you've seen the word once and when you've seen it 20 times and just know it.
Having said that, I've started porting my words over (mem-less) to Anki now because I don't trust Memrise to keep going forever. As for Assimil Russian, I am only up to lesson 35, but I'm using it more to sample "flavour" (colloquial phrases & expressions). I don't rate it as the strongest vocabulary course, for the reasons you stated - the commonest words are not repeated much and some unnecessarily obscure words are tossed in from time to time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 40 11 April 2014 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Found a nice post in Benny's log
1 person has voted this message useful |
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