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Me Specifically for Polyglot in 2011 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 1 of 18 30 December 2010 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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First of all, I'd like to wish everyone reading this a happy new year of 2011, aswell as hope that the year will be a very succesful and rewarding one for all of you in terms of languages studies. I certainly hope that it will be more succesful for me than 2010 was, which, although not what I'd consider a failure, didn't quite turn out to be what I had planned it out to be in 2009. I didn't actively start learning a certain language as I had hope and didn't progress enough for my tastes in the ones I was already studying. Here's hoping this year will be different.
And, yes, of course, I do already have a log by the name of "The place where I choke on languages", but it turned out that this name was apparently either a little too self-fulfilling or described the complete opposite of what was happening, as I couldn't be bothered to study languages nearly as often as I had planned. And, well, that thread was already ten pages long. Therefore seeing as it's a new year and everyone's creating new threads for their TAC efforts, I figured that I could sneak in too in starting me a new topic, even though I'm not taking part in the Total Annihilation Challenge. First of all a forewarning: my plans are, as it turns out, practically always subject to change. My former language log is a good example of this, as I seemingly could never make up my mind about what exactly I was studying. I have no organized structure of studying to brag of this time around either, but I hope that I'll fare better nonetheless. More mature, more patience and all that jazz. Russian and Swedish are currently my languages of interest. Russian because, well, it's just very fascinating and cool. World history is one of my biggest interests and Russia as all of its many variants from the times of the Kievan Rus and the Grand Duchy of Muscovy to the Russian Federation of the present day has played a large part in shaping it - being able to read history texts in Russian would be extremely satisfying, and would give me access to material previously out of my reach. There's also the obvious factor that I'm Finnish and Finland and Russia are neighbouring countries, so I hear the language is actually useful in the Eastern parts of my country too, which is where I coincidentally happen to live. Really seems like a perfect mix of reasons to study a language, so now all that's left is for me to actually overcome the challenges that this beautiful language presents. My current level in Russian is very or quite low, but I'm working my way through the New Penguin Russian Course. I can say and write some basic things and do probably already have what it would take to survive and even get by somewhat well in everyday situations in Russian, but not much else aside from that. Right now I'm trying to really internalize the case system into my mind and I do already have the nominative (because it's so hard!), accusative and genitive cases down pretty well, so only the dative and instrumental ones are left, I guess. The biggest hurdle will of course acquiring vocabulary, which will be no easy task, but which I am nevertheless very enthusiastic to take on, with the Spaced Repetition System Anki as my trusted companion here as always. Swedish is the second official state language of Finland alongside Finnish - it's only spoken by around 5% of the population, but for historical reasons svenska retains its very privileged and preserved status atleast for the time being. It happens to be that in order for a person to get into any "higher" level of job in Finland, by which I refer here to politics, social work etc., one has to have atleast a sort of basic command of Swedish. These areas are where my potential and likely career choices lay, so no option really there but to learn. Swedish is also a compulsory school subject in Finland and my high school matriculation exams take place next month, with Swedish being one of my most important subjects, so I'm going to have to prepare for that quite extensively. I guess I'll pretty much be at "basic fluency" after the exams are done. If I manage to get an E (Eximia cum laude) or an L (Laudatur) I'll switch it :D When my previous log kicked off, my language of choice was French, but I have to say that I have unfortunately lost great amounts of interest for it since. I can still understand it quite well in written form as long as no "advanced" vocabulary is involved and can speak it somewhat fluently too with, I'd guess, a lot of mistakes in the mix sometimes. My biggest problem is that I still can't understand the spoken language too well, with varying success really. The problem derives itself from me mainly having learned the language from books in the beginning and not listening to the spoken language so I don't know how every word I know in the written form is pronounced. I should probably work on that... I will soon have studied the language quite actively for around two years, but I still can't bring myself to switch it to "basic fluency" on my profile. I'm just not there yet. I've even considered taking a somewhat lenghty break from French, but I'm afraid that I would forget most of what I know in that case. We'll see... I'm also working on Spanish on and off, but I haven't really gotten started yet per se: I've just mostly been flirting with it since the autumn of 2009. I'm hoping to get started on actually studying it intensively quite soon, seeing as it shouldn't be that hard considering its easy pronunciation rules, the vocabulary it shares with languges I already know and my knowledge of French grammar, which is of course quite similiar to that of Spanish. Learning all the verb conjugations and tenses might take some time, but in some masochistic way I'm even kind of looking forward to that too. Wanderlust tends to catch me by surprise when I least expect it, and so I quite often get sudden, strong urges to start learning languages like - and these urges are by no means limited to the following - German, Dutch, Estonian, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Czech, and Slovak. Phew. Well, come to think about it, maybe they are mostly limited to those. I reckon German, Estonian and Italian are the only ones I would seriously potentially start working on, but I hope I'll be able to fight them off for the time being too before eventually succumbing to their irresistible charms. The time is just not right for them yet. Nicht haute abend :-) I will conclude this wall of text by pointing out that my study methods will consist of seemingly random things in no particular order, and that I will in all probability be jumping back and forth between languages, just like the last time around. Off we go as the trumpets blow. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 2 of 18 01 January 2011 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well then, 2011 it is. I will be starting with Spanish very soon, and strongly suspect that my main learning materials for the language will be this wonderful little website called Spanish.about.com and a Spanish textbook made for Finnish high schools called "Entre Amigos".
The book is intended to be used for the entire duration of the three year high school system of Finland, which in turn means that it's quite comprehensive: it has about 250 pages of text and other grammatical explanations that cover a fairly wide area of all things grammar, plus I also have an exercise book that goes along with it, although I doubt I'll be using that one too much, or at all. The book starts from the very basic stuff, buenos días, buenas tardes, ser, the personal pronouns and all that, whereas the final chapters seem to deal with "independent possessive pronouns" or something like that and something called "volverse" - I have no idea what that even is, really. Nobody is allowed to spoil it for me either. All the tenses and the subjunctive and all that fun is included, so I should be good. The only major or somewhat bothering setbacks are that the explanations can be somewhat scarce and that I have no audio learning material available. Both are easily overcome (why doesn't "come" have a cool ending - "overcommen" or something? :-[ ) though, seeing as there is an enormous amount of learning material available for Spanish on teh internets. Then there's the fact that I have already been listening to a lot of Spanish radio, its phonology is surprisingly similiar to that of Finnish - certainly a lot more than those of English and French are, so I don't have to change the way I speak too much from the way I would speak if I was speaking Finnish. I find Spanish language easy to pronounce aswell as understand when spoken, something that has been a major drawback for me when it comes to French. As far as audio comprehension goes, I mainly listen to Radio Nacional de Espana (if anyone knows how to make that sign that is supposed to go above the n there please do inform me, it is available right there on my keyboard but I can't seem to be able to discover how to get it), which seems to be a pleasant enough radio channel that is apparently the main radio channel of Spain or something as the name would suggest. Spanish.about.com is a site filled with information about the grammatical quirks of the language. I used its counterpart french.about.com back in the days (well, less than two years ago but yeah) and now this one will be helping me. Like I said, Entre Amigos' grammatical explanations are around six sentences in length at most, while I can be a pretty boneheaded guy, so Spanish.about.com's more comprehensive takes on things should come in handy if I just don't seem to be able to understand something. I have a positive outlook on Spanish. This may be somewhat delusional, but I get the feeling that in a way it could be the "easiest" language I've actually study-studied so far. It's not French, which I mostly learned from grammar books without listening to the spoken language, an approach that to this day provides its fair share of problems. It's also not French in that it's apparently supposed to have a somewhat less nitpicky grammar system, although more complex in some perspectives. It's not Swedish, which I'm not really studying voluntarily and do not always manage to find too exciting. It's not Russian which, while immensely exciting, is obviously more difficult for non-Slavic speakers and uses the Cyrillic script on top of it all. Provided that I actually manage to keep on studying Spanish and that I don't get lazy, I'll pretty much be setting on a goal of "basic fluency" by December 31st, 2011. Let's hope that one turns out as planned (but let's also not be too surprised if it doesn't... man, that Russian is fascinating...). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 3 of 18 05 January 2011 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sunday, January 1st
-After having an unusually big urge to hear some French, listened to RFI Monde for about forty minutes or so, I also did some listening yesterday . I think that took about twenty minutes. Understand bits here, don't understand there, so nothing new under the sun here. I guess there's not much to it. Maybe I just fail at spending enough time reading about pronunciation and spelling rules. -About thirty minutes of listening to Radio Nacional de España. I love the French language with all of its liaisons and other wonderful traits, but it's incredible how much easier it is to tell what the Spaniards are saying right away... One thing I don't really approve of is how much English I hear on both RFI and on this channel. Obviously the French and the Spanish have to hear some of our lingua franca too, but why couldn't they perhaps just stick to doing it when I'm sleeping or something like that? -Once again had a look at the chapters explaining the genitive case in New Penguin Russian. I'm specifically talking about the ого, его, ой, ей endings for adjectives here, which I appear to be completely obsessed to get down perfectly and correctly. Пальто старой маленькой русской девушкы! Лидер нового великого северного города! I've also been going over vocabulary from chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 via Anki. I seem to have most of it memorized by now, but I still have to enter all the vocabulary from all the previous chapters since I haven't done it yet for some reason. Oh well, I'm enjoying it. Yes, all of this took place three days ago. We'll be back up to date in no time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 4 of 18 06 January 2011 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Tuesday, January 4th, Wednesday the 5th & Thursday the 6th
-I read lesson 13 of Penguin Russian, which introduced me to the concept of using the aspects of verbs in the past tense. Apparently lesson 14 covers the same, except for the future. On one hand it's... well, it's not something I've encountered in this exact way in any language before. It's definitely going to take some time to get used to. However on the other hand, it just so happens that my native language Finnish sort of has a similiar feature. It's absolutely not the same thing at all, so no, the already complicated grammar of Finnish does not have aspects for verbs, but certain parts of its grammar help me understand the concept nevertheless. Russian has two verbs that both mean "to read", читать and прочитать, only the first one is called the imperfective form of the verb, while the latter is, predictably, the perfective. Using them in the present tense is fairly simple, as Я читаю means "I read" or "I'm reading", whereas я прочитаю means "I will read", that's to say, the perfective form indicates something happening in the future. This is essentially one of the two ways to express something happening in the future in Russian. Or something. I haven't read lesson 14 yet. This part of the whole aspects thing is no big deal. It gets a little more complicated when we start doing things in the past, though. I want to say "I read", but should I say Я читал or я прочитал? Penguin Russian attempts to provide explanations to do away with the obviously arising perplexion of the reader: unfinished actions are always in the imperfective (which does make sense, of course), actions repeated often are in the imperfective and so forth. You could say that Finnish has two verbs for "to read" too, however. "Lukea" is "to read", while "lueskella" essentially means "to sort of skim through or have a look at something and read some parts of it, didn't/won't necessarily finish". That's the meaning, I can't describe it better than that. Many, probably most verbs have two versions, so in essence: "Luin kirjaa" (I read a book) = Я прочитал книгу, "lueskelin kirjaa" = я читал книгу. "Hän unohti" (he forgot) = Он забыл, "hän unohteli" = он забывал! Bwahahaha! Well, to tell the truth, that's not really how Finnish makes the distinction between whether or not an action was a completed whole or not, but this log is not about that language. This small "aid" is also not of use in every case: for example, if something didn't happen, we are to use the imperfective: there is no equivalent for this in Finnish. Nevertheless what I've written above is somewhat helpful in grasping the basic meaning behind the aspects of verbs. -I have been listening to RFI again, and happily enough I've been able to understand more, just somewhat short of "a lot more", than a few days ago. There's still a lot of "noise" that I just can't understand, but I guess I'm slowly improving. -Oh, and in what was an unexpected turn of events to say the least, I learned some new English words! :-) Or maybe it wasn't that unexpected after all, as I had heard of these ones before, but I had never known what "hitherto", "whither", "thither" and "whence" meant before today. Well, I do know now, and I shall from now on start injecting them into my active vocabulary when I'm roaming about around this wild wild Web, all in the name of looking smarter than I really am. Tee hee hee. I regularly tend to forget that English is a foreign language for me just like French and Swedish from time to time since I use it so very, very much and it's such an integral part of... well, me and my surroundings, since it's so throroughly ingrained into my mind, but learning new words is a humbling reminder of this relevant fact. Even though I never intend to study English per se again, I'm thinking that I could still try to make an effort to learn twenty or ten new words or so per month, so as to just expand my vocabulary that much more - I do still on occasions that are rare but present themselves nonetheless draw a bit of a blank thinking about a fitting word to use in expressing something. Hopefully I will be able to come across some new words that will prove helpful in such situations. You can never really be "finished" with a foreign language, no matter how good you might get. -As a sidenote, I think these four words that I've learned today happen to be some very cool ones. In the recent weeks I've become more and more intrigued and charmed by the Germanic parts of English, maybe not so much by the grammar structure, but by the parts of the vocabulary of the language that are of Germanic origin. It would be wrong to say that studying French and discovering words that English has adopted from that language takes anything away from English (and as everyone on this board probably knows, there's a lot of those bad boys), but it does make me appreciate the words that are not of French origin a lot more, as they now have an aura of uniqueness about them to me (what do you mean, they're not really unique since other Germanic languages probably have words that look and mean almost exactly the same?!). Occasionally upon moments of boredom I find myself going through English vocabulary in my mind and trying to figure out whether something's "100% Germanic" or not... and of course, I've been reading about Old and Middle English on Wikipedia. The Germanic roots of English is a very fascinating topic indeed, and one that I wish to further explore in the future. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 5 of 18 09 January 2011 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
A native Finn posting a picture of the Russian flag on his blog or whatever with no underlying sarcastic or cynical intentions? You can't make this stuff up... It seems that this thread has been tagged with "wanderlust" : D Fits like a glove frankly. Russian: Like in Finnish, the second part of a sentence (hmm, could that be called a "relative clause" by any chance? I do believe I've heard of such a thing...) is in the present tense if the first part happens to be in the perfective: Я его сказал, сто я хочу его видеть = I told him that I want (and in English, of course, it's "wanted") to see him... and I do believe that ought to be сказал and not говорил since it describes a specific, single event. This is one thing that I actually didn't fully master (yes, I was hell bent on mastering the rules of the wicked relative clauses) in English until a couple of years ago, so I am grateful that it goes like this in Russian. Grateful to the ancient Slavic gods! ... or something like that. Men that may or may not exist somewhere in the sky aside, I'm not really sure what much else I can really "study" about aspects in the past tense... there isn't that much to it, really. "Completed" single actions and sequences of actions, except if they are repeated, are in the perfective. Everything else in the imperfective then, I guess? Penguin Russian supports this idea, claiming that stuff that didn't happen, "actions involving durations of time, actions repeated habitually or for an unspecified amount of time and verbs denoting states rather than actions" are expressed in the imperfective. And hey, besides, in the recent years I've become a lot less of a perfectionist compared to what I was before - it's not like I need to get this stuff 100% correct 100% of the time until I've reached a reasonable level of competency in Russian. The message is the most important, I reckon (as long as I don't completely downright suck, which would just be embarassing). Alrighty then. But wait, there's still one more thing, one more little word. Ли. It just so happens that a fellow board member by the name of Préposition has just recently written a great post about what exactly this thing is, and since he/she (judging by the content of the post I'd strongly guess she, but you never know) already covered everything so well, and because I clearly write this log for the enjoyment for all three of my readers rather than for my own personal good, I won't explain this thing that much. Basically it has to do with the aspect in the past tense: Я спроcил, говорил ли он по русский, I asked him if he speaks (spoke) Russian. As far as I understand this question could be both "I asked whether he..." and "...if he..." in English, but the general rule here is that whenever you could use "whether" (a beautiful word, by the way) in English, you must use ли in the sentence in Russian. Okay... seems straightforward enough, I suppose. Она хотяла знать, живем ли мы в России - She wanted to know whether we lived in Russia Если ты хочел видеть, могу ли я его искать... - If you wanted to see whether I could find him... I will probably have forgotten most of this tomorrow. French: Have continued listening to French radio as always. On Sunday, I listened to RFI for around two hours in a row. The first thirty minutes consisted of an interview of some woman who, I guess, had written some book about what she considered to be an ideal society and then discussed it with the hosts. I once again had one of those "good" days in terms of listening, as I felt that I could get the gist of almost everything that was said, even though there were a lot of things that I didn't catch or just words and sentences that I plain and simple didn't understand. Listening to radio every day really seems to... well, I wouldn't say it has helped me in tremendous amounts yet, but something's definitely taking place in my ability to understand spoken French, and for the better. I have a really optimistic feeling towards this language right now. Spanish: There was a certain list dubbed "Common irregular verbs" on Spanish.about.com in the "Beginner's Grammar" section, so I saw fit to learn these verbs. Not necessarily how they are conjugated, mind you (although I did also write all of their conjugations down in a Wordpad document that I suppose I'll now obsessively be going over and over again for the next couple of days... yes, for the present tense only!), but just their infinitive forms. Thankfully even the conjugations themselves don't seem complex, and there is a certain feel of familiarity with French in all of them. So far I have to say that I somehow prefer the written "look" of most French verbs to their Spanish counterparts: Spanish is no doubt an amazing and beautiful language (hermosa?), but "boire", "comprendre", "aller", "voir" and "savoir" just look more pleasant to me than "beber", "entender", "ir", "ver" and "saber". Then again I have to say that "decir" and "pagar" do beat "dire" and "payer" in my opinion. Ah well. Swedish: Well, I have an upcoming word test or ordprov in school next week about some boring vocabulary about furniture and stuff like that (ett golv = a floor, ett tak = a roof, en gillestuga = some cottage thingy) that I should obviously prepare for. Being the lazy wonderchild that I am I have not yet gotten started with this rather uninteresting task. Seriously. I find Swedish appealing on some levels and since Sweden is a neighbouring country of Finland, I probably would've started studying it (or Norwegian) eventually anyway for my own enjoyment (I can tell you that I'd be in the vast minority in my country in doing this), but frankly it's just really not that fascinating, not to mention inspiring when you have not chosen to study a language yourself by your own will. I'll cope, though. I'll cope, and of course, the biggest test of all, the matriculation exam, lies still further ahead. I also listened to Swedish radio for about twenty minutes or so on sverigesradio.se, where I listened to a program about the new Riksdag's first hundred days that started in September. Edited by Thatzright on 09 January 2011 at 7:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5335 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 18 11 January 2011 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm learning Russian through English as well (using the marvelous Princeton Russian Course) but I found that ли was easier to grasp though Finnish, as the language has a direct equivalent: the suffix -ko/-kö. The rules for the usage and placement of ли in Russian are also pretty much the same as with -ko in Finnish. Она хотела знать, живем ли мы в России. Hän halusi tietää asummeko me Venäjällä. She wanted to know if we lived in Russia. Могу ли я вам помочь? Voinko auttaa teitä? Can I help you? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 7 of 18 28 January 2011 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow, I hadn't even realized that it had been a few weeks now since I had last updated this here log of mine. Maybe that's because there hasn't been much to report. That's not to say that I haven't been studying languages, because I have, but nothing special has really taken place. My Spanish studies are underway, the amount of vocabulary I know is increasing quickly and the language seems quite 'easy' as of now - all of that is probably only because I'm just starting out, though. That being said, knowing English and quite a bit of French certainly has turned out to be helpful, as I can already get the gist, if not completely understand, most of what I see and read. Even the conjugation of 'ser' in the conditional, present subjunctive, the perfective and the future already comes quickly and easily as the forms are so similiar to their French counterparts.
I also ended up falling victim to wanderlust the other day... and for once the term wanderlust really is appropriate to use here. Nicht sehr gutt! Ich wollen nicht Deutsch jetzt lernen, but I just couldn't resist the urge and so I, ahem, acquired the Michel Thomas Foundation course. I'm about three or four CD's through right now and I'll probably finish it soon. This is just flirting, though, and so I won't add German to the list of languages that I'm studying. Still, it will undoubtedly be there one day. I suppose that's about it for now...
Mm jep, näihän sen voi ajatella :-) Sometimes it's sort of interesting to note similiarities in the grammar systems of Finnish and Russian. It kind of makes you think about our dear region's history in general, seeing as Finnic people and tribes (but not Finns and Estonians) originally inhabited what is now northwestern European Russia, until at some point Slavs arrived in the region and apparently these two groups then sort of assimilated into one another - both groups' languages, of course, survived this, although the Finnic languages by a far narrower margin. When we keep all of this in mind, I don't think this example you have pointed out and many other similiarities between the languages, despite how different they really are as a whole, can be coincidences. One really funny thing I noted reading the Penguin book (although this has to do with loanwords, not grammar per se) was that "half a kilo" in Russian is apparently полкило... I don't know if пол and кило are supposed to be written separately or whatever, but as we know it's almost the exact same thing in spoken Finnish: "half a kilo" becomes "pool kiloo" in many dialects, even though it's "puoli kiloa" in the standard written language. Loanwords are understandable, but it really amused me to see that a concept of pointing out how much there is of something, that's to say a concept expressing quantity, had been loaned to Finnish. I better not keep on thinking about this stuff for too long, though, or else I'll end up really sad, thinking about how only Finnish and Estonian are the only Baltic-Finnic languages that are really "alive" in this day and age. Livonian, Vepsian, many dialects of the Karelian language, none of these survived :-( Okay, so, Karelian may be or may not be considered a separate language (Finnish and Karelian are basically Swedish and Norwegian or Russian and Belarusian as a comparison... Estonian is like Czech or something), but it has like 100 000 speakers most of which speak Russian as their native language. I don't think it's even an official language in the Republic of Karelia, a federal subject of the Russian Federation that borders Finland. So yeah... I'd learn these languages if they were in a better shape. Shame. Edited by Thatzright on 28 January 2011 at 1:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5663 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 8 of 18 27 February 2011 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This language learning thing is not proceeding all that well. In addition to my typical wanderlust, there is also the fact that my matriculation exams will continue soon in form of history, so I've been focusing on that quite a bit aswell (currently suffering through the age of feodalism, which is not exactly one of my favourites, but then again I'll have to take a look at historical European art styles soon too, and that is just plain torturous). Of course, like I've already probably mentioned dozens of times, Swedish is one of these matriculation subjects for yours truly so I should technically working on that aswell, but so far it just hasn't really taken off the ground too well.
I've continued "studying" Russian and French too, though, but it's mostly just consisted of trying to really hammer home what I've learned so far. I made the mistake of having a look at a Russian news site the other day - it was, of course, as was to be expected, filled with words I had never seen before. It was a really disencouraging experience at this point, and the Cyrillic alphabet providing an extra layer of "strangeness" didn't help. It almost made Russian seem "impossible to learn", mostly because there is just so much vocabulary that I need to learn. Like, at that exact moment, I just realized how many words one needs to know to really be proficient in a language and then thought about how strange so many Russian words seem. French, Spanish, Swedish and eventually German seem completely doable because a very great deal of their vocabulary is similiar, but I don't really have that luxury with Russian. This actually provides a part of its charm for me, but in these learning stages it's not all that helpful. I spend wayyyy to much thinking about learning languages and planning how I will do this instead of, you know, actually getting down to the studying part. Le sigh. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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