|
 |
Russian - advancing to reading literature | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7382 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 17 23 March 2005 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Ardaschir, this is an immensely useful post. I have immediately ordered all Russian-German bilingual books by Reclam from Amazon.de! They cost about 3 Euros a piece and I can deal with the small print they use.
Your advice is very encouraging for me since it points to an already existing path through the thick taiga of Russian litterature. I will try to follow you in that taiga, armed with the confidence that this path has already been walked before! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7262 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 10 of 17 24 March 2005 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
|
You're welcome, both of you. Heartburn, your question is not at all off the mark. Indeed, using unabridged audiobooks is an important component in this whole process -- so important that I cannot believe I have forgotten it until now. When I have been able to obtain tapes to an accompanying text, I shadow them in exactly the same fashion that I shadow to begin learning a language (i.e., listen through earphones, echoing aloud the second I hear any sound, and reading the text with my eyes at the same time, all the while preferably while walking rather than while sitting down).
With Spanish, you should have an extremely wide range of choices. With Russian, there are fewer, or at least there where when I was there five or six years ago. The situation may have changed, but there were no commercially available audiobooks in the shops there and no one had heard of such a thing, so I almost left without acquiring any. Thankfully, it dawned on me that such audiobooks were originally produced for the blind before they were put on the general market, so I found an association for the blind, and indeed was able to get a good selection--tales of Belkin by Pushkin and the novella Kazaki by Tolstoy among others. I am in my office right now looking at these as I write, but unfortunately they do not have any identifying address that I can pass along. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7382 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 17 25 March 2005 at 1:09am | IP Logged | ||
|
If you agree we can use the new Audiobooks thread for discussing audio books in General and this thread for Russian litterature and audiobooks.
I found a website that sells many Russian audiobooks off the web in MP3 versions: http://www.priviet.com/ Another site in Finland sells just as many and I ordered a few today from them: http://www.ruslania.com/ Edited by administrator on 25 March 2005 at 8:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marcus Groupie Australia Joined 7217 days ago 55 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish | Message 12 of 17 26 March 2005 at 4:57am | IP Logged | ||
Wow, I was completely unaware of this technique (less reliance on a dictionary). Come to think of it I probably do rely on wordreference.com a little too much. Thanks Ardaschir, I'm going to this a try. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7262 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 13 of 17 26 March 2005 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The biggest mistake I myself made throughout the first decade or so of my language learning life was to think that the dictionary was my friend as I was learning a language. A dictionary is not a learner's tool; a dictionary is a means for clarity and advancement for those who already know a language.
11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6556 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 17 09 March 2007 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | ||
Does any one happen to know where the earlier post is? Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| linguanima Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6724 days ago 114 posts - 123 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Spanish, French Studies: Italian, Latin, German | Message 15 of 17 10 March 2007 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||
Why Russian-German? I'm curious because they tell me that the way Russian words are constructed is similar to the German one. I wonder whether the mastery of German will help. I'm thinking of learning Russian some years later. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6949 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 16 of 17 10 March 2007 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | ||
I am still a beginner in German, and Russian is my native language, whose grammar I know intuitively, but which I have not had a chance to analyze. So, while you are waiting for a more qualified answer, perhaps the following comments will serve as a meandering stopgap. Some months before I took up German, I saw someone's comment on http://lingvoforum.net to the effect that English and French have pretty much left the Indo-European sphere. It got stuck in my head, even though I didn't quite understand what that poster was getting at. After taking up German, I think I do. Russian does construct a lot of its vocabulary by attaching prefixes and suffixes to roots, not unlike German, although to me the "flavor" does seem to be somewhat different - I don't believe the Russian words get quite as long as they do in German. Russian does have 6 cases, so dealing with 4 German cases will at least get you used to the idea. The verb tense system seems quite different though. Basically, the languages are fairly different. And yet, there is that funny feeling I've been experiencing while studying German and comparing some of its constructions to Russian, that they really do hearken back to some ancient common source. And this feeling is different from what I would get while studying English or French. It's in some (not all!) aspects of the word order, the way some things are said (there was a thread on "mir ist kalt" in the forum - that's how you say it in Russian too, except "ist" dropped, and an adverb related to the adjective "kalt" is used instead of the corresponding adjective), etc. I also noticed a couple of claims on the same site that Russians find German easier to learn than French. Given that I've also seen claims that Italian is the easiest West European language for the Russians to learn, it seems a bit dangerous to conclude that the French vs. German comparison, even if it's true, has to do with the Germanic languages being generally somehow closer to Russian than the Romance ones. Edited by frenkeld on 11 March 2007 at 10:26am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
