Jerrod Senior Member United States Joined 6508 days ago 168 posts - 176 votes Studies: Russian, Spanish
| Message 33 of 39 18 March 2007 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
LilleOSC, of course pronunciation is good. In Russian if you don't make a certain letter soft, a lot of people won't understand what you are saying.
With that said, I do my flashcards on my own without my girlfriend (she is a Russian). Once a week she listens and corrects all my mistakes. After that I rarely have trouble remembering the proper way to say it. If you can study for 2 or 3 weeks, and then meet up with a tutor for an hour and remember the proper way to say it, you should be fine. If not, maybe think about buying an audio book with a text and listening and reading. If that is not an option and you are some how isolated, I would think it would be best to get it right now. There was a recent threat here about pronunciation and how important it is.
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MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6700 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian
| Message 34 of 39 03 August 2007 at 11:18pm | IP Logged |
I heard somewhere that the majority of the author's own vocabularly, or at least the vocabulary that will show up in the novel in question, is expressed somwhere between the first 20 to forty pages. Any truth to this?
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FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6364 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 35 of 39 04 August 2007 at 12:10am | IP Logged |
MeshGearFox wrote:
I heard somewhere that the majority of the author's own vocabularly, or at least the vocabulary that will show up in the novel in question, is expressed somwhere between the first 20 to forty pages. Any truth to this? |
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I haven't heard this before, but I agree with the idea that the first twenty or so pages of a novel are the most challenging to read, as they are when the reader becomes accustomed to the author's prosody.
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Zhuangzi Nonaglot Language Program Publisher Senior Member Canada lingq.com Joined 7033 days ago 646 posts - 688 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian
| Message 36 of 39 04 August 2007 at 12:43am | IP Logged |
MeshGearFox wrote:
I heard somewhere that the majority of the author's own vocabularly, or at least the vocabulary that will show up in the novel in question, is expressed somwhere between the first 20 to forty pages. Any truth to this? |
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This is certainly not true. I have read Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, and not Anna Karenina on LingQ and there are still lots of new words in every chapter. It is surprising how the number of new words only declines gradually. That is reality not theory.
Edited by Zhuangzi on 04 August 2007 at 12:43am
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weilidai2001 Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6678 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: French
| Message 37 of 39 17 August 2007 at 5:20pm | IP Logged |
I'm learning French, I read French online news regularly. When I encounter a word that I don't know, I record that word, along with its translation and the sentence that I found it in, into a little program that I made.
When I have free time, I use this program to review the words by testing myself if I can complete a sentence using a word that I looked up. It has increased my vocabulary alot!
You can download my program on http://groups.google.co.uk/group/PhraseBaseBuilder
If you have a Pocket PC, I can also put up a Pocket PC version of the program as well! (All free of charge of course!)
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MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6700 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian
| Message 38 of 39 18 August 2007 at 2:30am | IP Logged |
weil: I'll check that out. It looks useful. I find that, more than reviewing, just recording something interesting is helpful to remember it, so yeah. Also, it looks like it writes to just XML files? So potentially, one could use the same files for, say, other programs, I guess. Hrm.
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burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6449 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish
| Message 39 of 39 18 August 2007 at 6:03am | IP Logged |
MeshGearFox wrote:
I heard somewhere that the majority of the author's own vocabularly, or at least the vocabulary that will show up in the novel in question, is expressed somwhere between the first 20 to forty pages. Any truth to this? |
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Well, I am currently reading through a collection of Antonio Machado poems. I do think there is a bit of truth to what you heard, but not much. Machado uses quite a lot of specific words through the book - he writes mostly about nature so there's different trees and the like. I can read some of the short poems without having to look up a new word, but the sometimes I find many new ones. I think it depends on the level you are at. The author will use a base vocabulary and then have their own vocabulary on top of that. If you know all the base vocabulary then you'll find the new words reappear constantly, but if you don't know the base vocab then you'll find new words constantly. I'm not sure how you'd distinguish between the base and the author's own but it gets the idea across.
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