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Rushing Russian to B1 and Beyond | ||
Tags: Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6242 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 9 of 14 06 December 2011 at 8:12pm | IP Logged |
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I did also wait in vain for the cases when I went through the foundation and the advanced
course a couple of years ago. I know MT is centered on verbs but cases are essential to Russian grammar, so a basic introduction is indeed motivated. I read somewhere that they are introduced in the vocabulary course, but I haven't used that one myself. Neither have I tried MT for German, so I'm not aware of how cases are treated there. Good luck with reaching B1 by next June! I would also be happy to reach that level by then ... //aloysius 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Scorpicus Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5337 days ago 27 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, ItalianB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 14 07 December 2011 at 8:36am | IP Logged |
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Hi Aloysius. There are no cases even in the advanced course? That really would be lacking content wise. I was thinking of maybe using MT advanced as a warm up to the active wave of Assimil (when I get there), but if there are still no cases then it wouuldn't be worth it. It was a bit disappointing that MT Russian foundation did tend to teach only the easy sides of the grammar and that alot of the vocab taught already resembled the English. In other words, the stuff you don't need a fancy audio course to learn!
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| fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 5038 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French | Message 11 of 14 09 December 2011 at 5:28am | IP Logged |
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A MT course without the students sounds so tempting haha.
I wish you luck on your studies. Russian is on my to do list after I get further along with Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Scorpicus Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5337 days ago 27 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, ItalianB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 14 14 December 2011 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
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So, progress hasn't been quite as galloping as I would like due mainly to my Assimil being delayed in the post (hopefully, it's not lost in the post). Nevertheless, I've being using the excellent Princeton course and am now at lesson 18.
I'm using the course in a very Assimil-esque fashion, shadowing the dialogues, reading the grammar notes and completing the audio exercises. To actually make the vocabulary stick, I'm following a pattern of repetitions of the dialogues, repeating the day after, three days later, a week later, two weeks later and then finally another two weeks later. Before, with Assimil, I always used to simply repeat shadow the seven lessons before the current lesson, but it is amazing how more effective it is to properly space out the repetitions to retain the vocab better. The dialogues are very conversational (although, there did seem to be a bit of a rut when introducing possessive pronouns where lessons seemed to all revolve around the conundrum of 'where is my vodka?') and at a pretty native speed, at least to my ear. This makes shadowing tricky as the dialogue moves so fast, but each dialogue comes with two MP3s: first, with the dialogue at normal speed and with minimal pauses, second, with dialogue broken up into lines with pauses for 'listen and repeat'. The broken up MP3 lets you train for shadowing effectively the first version without pauses. Kinda, a good alternative to Assimil's 'start slow and speed up over time' method to let you shadow accurately. Anywho, so far I have 25 hours of Russian under my belt. The past few days I've only been doing one hour, and I definitely need to get back to doing two hours of Russian daily if I'm going to reach the target. If Assimil would actually turn up I would have something different to fill my second hour! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Scorpicus Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5337 days ago 27 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, ItalianB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 14 01 February 2012 at 9:24pm | IP Logged |
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So, as I predicted, I've been completely lazy at updating this log! However, I have nevertheless been energetically studying Russian everyday for the past two months.
My progress? According to my hours spreadsheet, I've spent exactly 80 hours studying Russian (unfortunately, below my two hours a day, every day, target). I'm on lesson 54/84 of the Princeton 101 course, and lesson 30/100 of Assimil. At the half way point in the Princeton course, I started an 'active wave'. Like you would with Assimil, starting again with lesson 1, I look at the the English and translate aloud into Russian. I also write out the lesson while looking only at the English. In my active wave of Princeton I'm at lesson 15/84. Reading back over my last posts, I was getting a bit flustered over pronunciation. That particular hurdle seems a long time ago! Although, it certainly isn't true to say Russian is a language where there is one sound to each letter, you can still look at a word and work out accurately how to pronounce it (well, if you know where the stress is.) Of course, there are quite a few concepts that you have to get your head around (hard/soft sounds, voiced/unvoiced consonants, stress etc.) but once you have, it all becomes rather logical. In comparison, I think it took me longer to get my head around French pronunciation than Russian. However, now that I'm writing in the language, a new problem has emerged: the tricksy nature of Russian spelling. I seem to be continually mixing up 'a' and unstressed 'o'; 'с' and 'з'; 'и' and unstressed 'e' (then it turns out to be neither, 'ы'). Hopefully, (very hopefully) this will straighten itself out with time. As far as the grammar is concerned, I can recognise four cases, both singular and plural, with another two to go, dative and instrumental, so fun times ahead! Though, I'm kinda hoping I'm on the downward slope as far as cases are concerned after the genitive. I've also just been introduced to 'aspect', which seems to essentially mean having to learn two stems for each verb - extra memorising labour. To me, the notion seems very similar to the imperfect/perfect past tense in French/Italian, with a few twists, but its not too boggling. Actually, I'm finding it incredibly useful reading grammar explanations aimed at an English speaker, in the Princeton course, and then for a French speaker, in Assimil. Anyway, two months down, four more to go until judgement day (well, an exam, at least). I'll try not to wait another two months till I write another update! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Scorpicus Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5337 days ago 27 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, ItalianB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 14 20 July 2013 at 4:16pm | IP Logged |
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Hello blog.
So, its about a year and a half on from when I made my first post here. Time for a so-overdue-I've-forgotten-how update. Well, actually less of an update and more of a confession: I failed my lofty goal of sitting the B1 paper after six months. As that Woody Allen quote goes, “90% of success is turning up”, and, well, I didn't turn up. Allow me to make my excuses. In short, my life as an unemployed graduate began to weigh on me and, despite all my free time, my motivation and discipline for the language was short circuited. Days and weeks passed without any Russian, but eventually I got myself back on track. Although over the past year, even on track, I haven't been so much rushing Russian as rambling Russian. However, for all the lost time, inefficiency and frustration, I have still made a half respectable amount of progress. Hence, I can now swallow my pride and update the log! So, what have I done? Well, apparently in my last post I was plugging away at both Assimil and the Princeton course. Looking over my old notebook, I got to writing out lesson 50 on my “second wave” of the Princeton course before throwing in the towel to concentrate on Assimil 'Le Russe'. I then got to around lesson 60 on the passive wave of Assimil before I became overwhelmed by all the grammar I didn't know, and gave up on Assimil. Thus, began a demotivated period of no Russian. That was a first for me as I usually love the Assimil courses. I think the problem was that, after finishing the Princeton course, I had a bunch of words and decent pronunciation but a grammar foundation as solid as a rice cake. To follow this up with Assimil didn't help me sort out any of my issues with the grammar, hence the frustration. So, after abandoning Assimil (and unfortunately, followed by an undetermined period of no Russian), I began the excellent New Penguin Russian book by Nicholas Brown. Single handedly, this book salvaged my grammar. At least, by the end, I understood pretty much all of the rules, even if I still mixed up prepositions, had to think for half an hour to form the genitive and the application of aspect remained largely mysterious. On finishing the book, which took a few months, I thought it was high time to dip into some native materials. So, I reconnected with my inner child and got hold of a Russian dubbed version of “The Lion King” (nope, not Tarkovsky yet). Disappointingly but not unexpectedly, I understood pretty much nil. Unfortunately, completing grammar exercises, though useful in many ways, doesn't really help with oral comprehension. So, I decided to return to Assimil. Although, instead of returning to my abandoned “le Russe”, the newest version from 2010 that seemed a bit too much like square one to me, I decided to go back a generation to “Le Russe sans Peine” from 1995. This version has the reputation for being a disappointment in terms of Assimil books, with only 70 lessons and an impossibly steep learning curve for a beginner. But as I had already a lot of Russian under my belt, I thought I could I handle it. The learning curve does indeed take off at about lesson 30, and for this reason it's certainly not a good course for the fresh faced beginner. There are a few too many lessons based on literature that, though they are culturally great, just aren't useful in terms of learning conversational language. Despite this, though, I really enjoyed the dialogues, most of which were packed with useful conversational language and the content has an extremely Russian feel to it (I'm not sure what that means exactly, but it does). I would recommend it to intermediate/advanced learners. Also, though not strictly important the 1995 edition is definitely wittier than the 2010. More importantly, once I'd finished it (though I admit the active wave for lessons 60-70 was impossible - you really can't active wave Tolstoy and Dostoevsky...) my comprehension had noticeably improved. Next, I returned to the grammar side of things. Although, I understood the rules thanks to Penguin, and I think things were starting to cement after Assimil, I still needed far more practice to improve my accuracy and speed at recalling cases etc. Not to mention that aspect and motion are still two dark chasms in my knowledge of Russian. Thus, I bought a copy of Schaum's Russian Grammar and so far, it seems every bit as excellent and exhaustive as the other Schaum's grammar work books. Currently, I'm about half way through, though I'm still to reach the massive chapter on verbs that begins about page 200, so aspect and verbs of motion remain foggy for me. But, as far as the case system is concerned, I think I've really turned a corner. As some famous language learner quipped, it's not so much a matter of learning, so much as getting used to a language. And finally it seems like I'm “getting used” to the Russian case system. Certainly, I no longer have to spend ten minutes scratching my brain to try and remember the dative plural any more. Alongside Schaum's grammar, I also decided to return to Assimil's 'Le Russe'. “I did pay 60 Euros for the thing after all,” I thought, “so I might as well use it.” Yes, it was a bit tiresome to return to “добрый день”, but I sprinted through the first forty lessons or so (out of 100) until things got more interesting. I'm glad I did, because it is a good course, despite me abandoning it a year ago. The learning curve is far smoother than the 1995 edition, and all the dialogues are consistently about two minutes long, instead of the six minute epics you get in the latter stages of the 1995 edition. So, I have now finished both the passive and active wave of the Assimil Le Russe, and while I'm still beavering away on Schaum's grammar, I've decided to do a third active wave for good measure. I've found that with Russian you can never repeat something enough times. Well, I guess you're thinking, “Yeah, that's great and all, but after all that work what's your level?” Eh... очень трудный вопрос. I'd like to think that if I took the B1 exam now, I could pass it. Actually, compared to my French when I passed the B1, I think I actually have a better oral comprehension, and I feel like I have now climbed to the top of the mountain of Russian grammar. I still need to improve my accuracy (seriously with aspect), but its very much a down hill slope. I think the biggest problem is still a deficiency of vocabulary, which is preventing me from really getting stuck into native materials. At the moment, I have to consult a dictionary every five words. Not sure really how to tackle that problem except keep learning, and know I'll get there eventually. The book “Roots of the Russian Language” by G.Patrick could potentially be a helpful purchase. Then, of course, there is speaking. I have had no practice speaking beyond the active waves of Assimil, which, though useful, is hardly a substitute. Travel to Russia doesn't seem a likely prospect any time soon, so I guess I'm going to have to organise a Skype exchange. No short cuts there really; if I want to master this language then I'm just going to have to summon my courage and speak. Goals? Well, finish Schaum's grammar for starters. Then the last thing on my original list of course materials is the Princeton 105 course, which has been safely stored on my laptop for a while. After that... maybe another grammar workbook (I'm not sure I'll ever do enough of those in Russian) and a dive into native materials, which at the moment I'm simply dipping in my toes. If anyone would like to recommend intermediate/advanced learning materials for Russian then I'm all ears :) As for examinations, I missed out the exam session this summer (too busy), but next year I'll sign up for it. If I was going to be ambitious I'd say I'll aim for the B2 exam next June, but we'll see. So this post has totally been TL;DR. Hopefully it won't be another year till I update next time :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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