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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4713 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 17 of 31 01 June 2013 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, if you do go through the MT Vocabulary, I'd be happy to read your thoughts on it
in this space. I think, though, I will hold off on doing MT Advanced & Vocabulary until I am a good ways into Modern Russian. Since they are each a bit over 5 hours long, I will probably aim to do them on a Saturday/Sunday of one weekend somewhere down the line. Yeah, I have glanced through the old Russian Without Toil, and it looks very substantial. I also like the new Assimil. I just think it is not the best choice for how I want to allocate my study time currently. I actually ordered the Modern Russian 1 book off of Amazon. It is available for under $10 after shipping: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0878401695/ref=oh_details_o 00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Then, Indiana University has actually uploaded all of the audio for it here: http://www.iu.edu/~celtie/russian_b09.html So, for less than $10, you can have the physical book to work with, and something like 20+ hours of audio! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4713 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 18 of 31 01 June 2013 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Michel Thomas Russian Beginner's Program Review
This 8-cd course has a native Russian speaker acting as the teacher for two English speaking students. It is a nice plus, because she says the final answer to every question in Russian, so you know your pronunciation is correct if you mimic her. One thing to keep in mind as you go through the course is that the students are British, and it is focused on British English. This is not a huge deal, but there were a handful of spots where things sounded a bit odd to my American ear. The course is all audio, though the alphabet is covered toward the end of Disc 8, and you will need the booklet with it. Fortunately, the booklets are all available online. Here is the one for the Foundation course: http://www.michelthomas.com/assets/downloads/FOUNDATION%20RU SSIAN.pdf There is a bit over 9 hours of audio. You stop when you need to to formulate your answer before the students do. All told, I spent around 14 hours on this course including both pausing time, and going over the last few tracks the next day before beginning the new lessons. My overall impressions of the course are quite positive. As I said, having a native speaker as a teacher made me feel confident I was remembering the right pronunciations. Though, this course is not really about pronouncing. The idea seems to be to give you the basic framework of how to put sentences together. Now it seems it is up to me to find vocabulary to build up from this strong foundation. The booklet has the following directions for after I am done with the course: "Try to speak with native speakers whenever possible, as this is invaluable for improving your fluency. Magazines, newspapers and podcasts (especially those which feature interviews) will give you practice in the most current and idiomatic language. Expose yourself to the language whenever you can – you will have firm foundations on which to build." So, if anyone has a suggestion of a good website for either listening to slow-spoken Russian news, or listening to Russian news with transcripts, I would really appreciate it! Also, the two other students were generally nice company to have. The amount of times I was angry at them both for messing up added up to less than half a dozen. This makes me think I came to this course at the right time in my studies since it was challenging at times, but never overwhelming. One other thing I would be interested in knowing is whether the Advanced CD starts off with a review of all that has been covered in the Foundation! I would be glad to recommend this to anyone starting Russian, or near the beginning of their Russian studies, that wants some real practice in constructing Russian sentences! As the last sentence I translate into Russian in the course says, "I want, I can, and I will speak Russian well." 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5058 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 19 of 31 01 June 2013 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
And after all these courses and years of studying Russian you could not explain what the disjunctive ъ and ь were used for, and you are not alone. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4713 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 20 of 31 01 June 2013 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have no idea what the word disjunctive means, haha. Will Modern Russian teach me? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 21 of 31 02 June 2013 at 6:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That's cool to know, when i get back to the states i'll try to pick it up :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5058 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 22 of 31 02 June 2013 at 9:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, it will. I mean signs between a consonant and a vowel, like объём, пью, чьи and so on. They are called разделительные in Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4713 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 23 of 31 03 June 2013 at 1:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It is going to be a couple weeks until my copy of Modern Russian 1 arrives in the mail.
I figured I would take the opportunity to work through some other resources I have on hand. Today, I completed The Russian FAST Coursethrough the end of Lesson 4. There is not much new material here, so it is going, well, fast! I figure I will just work through the course at a fast pace, and then go back and review the vocabulary. Any words I don't know by heart already, I will make note-cards of. Maybe I will even try Anki. I've never really played around with Anki before, so hopefully it is not too tricky. I also want to make use of Assimil as a resource, even if I am not going to do it in a more traditional way. I have just downloaded Audacity. I have just downloaded the newest free version. I've never used it, but I am hoping it is not too hard to figure out. I'd like to remove the slow reads of the first 14 lessons of Assimil Russian, and shrink down all the silent gaps to make it more like native audio. If I am able to do that successfully, I'd like to just use it as a L-R/shadowing tool and do a bunch of lessons in one sitting whenever I am bored. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4713 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 24 of 31 03 June 2013 at 5:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have finished using Audacity to shorten 25 lessons so far. It is a bit time consuming
since I am lopping off the lesson number along with the exercises. My end goal is just to have pure dialogue to learn with. I am using the following settings: Min silence duration 200 milliseconds Max silence duration 1000 milliseconds Silence compression 4 :1 Threshold for silence -20dB Anyway, to summarize my Russian studies through the weekend that just finished: Completed Michel Thomas Russian Foundation Course Complete the first four lessons of the Russian FAST Course 1 person has voted this message useful |
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