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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6387 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 1 of 1 05 November 2007 at 11:49am | IP Logged |
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Since my Danish hasn't been touched in about six weeks, I thought it would make more sense to write about Russian.
I'm studying Spanish and Russian ab initio at Oxford. Due to their rather old-fashioned style, I don't have much Spanish, but I have lots of Russian. I only have eight contact hours a week, which isn't a great deal, but lots of self studying to do. Each Friday we get a big booklet and a CD full of stuff to learn over the weekend, as well as exercises. Then we go through the whole thing over the week, basically. There's lots of speaking and listening to the teacher speaking Russian, as well as an oral class each week, so it's rather good that way. We have a dictation test on Wednesdays, vocab test on Thursdays, and then a grammar test on Fridays, so they're not my best days (my best day is Tuesday, since I have no Russian classes then). I'll quickly recount what I've done for the last four weeks, because I'm procrastinating and don't want to sit down to learning just yet. Week 1: For the first two or three days we did the alphabet and spelling rules, then we got on to Lesson One proper. That had about 80 words to learn, including some phrases ("how are you?" etc.), which wasn't too bad. Then stuff on genders of nouns, demonstrative particles (вот, вон, это) and a little bit about interrogative words. The only exercises were about 35 sentences to translate. We also have a word formation class for which we have to learn words, I think that one had about one hundred, though I didn't learn them. Week 2: A bit lighter on the vocab, only about 50 to learn. The grammar for this week was personal pronouns and possessive adjectives (all in the nominative), first and second conjugations of verbs, the negative, the word for "if", interrogative forms and the use of "ли". Then translate a few paragraphs from Russian, conjugate a few verbs and about 15 English sentences to put into Russian. Silly amounts to learn for word formation, again. Week 3: Stepping up a bit now. Around 100 words to learn, plus a few more dotted throughout the grammar sections. Grammar was on "весь", verbs that changed letters in the first person singular, declension of adjectives (just nominative) and the two ways of saying "and" and "also". Exercises were again just translating paragraphs, conjugating verbs and translation into Russian. More random words to learn for word formation. It's usually about ten root words and then all the different words you can get from those, so some of the ones we had to learn were pretty odd. Week 4: Another 100 or so words to learn. Grammar was verbs with special stems, reflexive verbs and declensions. We did the nominative plural and accusative singular and plural, on nouns, adjectives, possessive adjectives, pronouns, lots of stuff. Exercises this time was about five paragraphs to translate, phrases to put into the nominative and accusative, making plurals of nouns and about 20 sentences to put into Russian. Week 5: Current week, the hardest yet. This week we have about 120 words to learn, the months of the year, the prepositional case (with nouns, adjectives, etc. etc.), the formation of the past tense, the conditional mood, some irregular verbs, cardinal and ordinal numerals, dates, and a little bit on fleeting vowels. Exercises is the same as last week really, just a bit more of it. I also have about 90 words to look up in the dictionary to get their gender and meaning and that will take ages. There's about 200 or so for the word formation class as well. I'd say I have a love/hate thing going on with Russian now. It's a hell of a lot of work, especially when I have essays and translations to do for Spanish. But we're making a lot of progress very quickly and it's quite gratifying. Next term we do a bit of poetry and then some of Checkov's short stories. It took me about five years to get to a literature-reading level in Spanish. It would be nice if we got a review lesson, but we don't. Next week aspects are introduced, and apparently I will have to go back through the last five lessons and learn the other aspect for every verb I've done so far, and whatever else I would normally have. So I'm going to do loads of Russian this week and hopefully I will have a firm basis to carry on. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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