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Jumping into Russian: Tips? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| ChristopherTL Diglot Newbie United States transparent.com Joined 6470 days ago 12 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 1 of 15 15 March 2007 at 10:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I am taking the plunge and starting from scratch with a new language: Russian. I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet yet or anything else about the language.
Has anybody done Russian "from the ground up" on their own? Full disclosure: I do work for a language software company so i will be using their product(s) but recognize that i will need outside resources and most importantly: ADVICE!! Thanks all. -Christopher 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jerrod Senior Member United States Joined 6509 days ago 168 posts - 176 votes  Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 2 of 15 15 March 2007 at 11:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Christopher. Russian is a fun language to learn and very rewarding, but at times a bit hard.
I studied Russian at different universities, but also on my own. I can't really give you advice on a full home study course, but I am here if you want to message me and ask a question. I have a log I am running, and while it is at a more advanced stage, you may pull something useful from it. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 15 15 March 2007 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have also taken the plunge into Russian. But my method is somewhat idiosyncratic. My reasoning is that people would normally start out with very very simple texts. In practice this means you have to use a text book system. I have looked at those at my local library and I didn't like them. What I would like to do is to go directly to real texts, and there I'm very much tempted to use those at the GLOSS homepage because they have both translations and audio. But I am realistic enough to see that it would be quite hard to start directly with material on that level, so I have taken the radical decision first to learn a few thousand words with the word list methods that I have described in another thread. In parallel with this I am reading a fairly comprehensive Russian grammar.
In this way I expect to be at least in a somewhat better position when I do start out reading real stuff sometime next month. Edited by Iversen on 15 March 2007 at 5:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ChristopherTL Diglot Newbie United States transparent.com Joined 6470 days ago 12 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 4 of 15 16 March 2007 at 8:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Iverson thanks a lot for your thoughts. I am, for now, planning a similar approach: 1) learn the alphabet cold 2) get a couple hundred (gotta start somewhere!) words under my belt, then examine what's out there in terms of free reading and listening resources.
The alphabet is tough! It's hard to adjust, but I keep reminding myself that I did at one point learn Devanagari, so Cyrillic should be within reach. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TDC Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6927 days ago 261 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian | Message 5 of 15 16 March 2007 at 1:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Track down the 1970 Russian Assimil course. It can be found if you know where to look.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jerrod Senior Member United States Joined 6509 days ago 168 posts - 176 votes Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 6 of 15 17 March 2007 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||
ChristopherTL, keep at it! I remember my first day in class when my teacher told us that we had to learn cursive. After seeing what she wrote on the board, I thought I could never learn it. What was worse is she said that this is the easy part and you will have it down in 2 weeks. She was right, after a week of practice it becomes very very easy. Just stick with it and write the words out. Do you have a good workbook that covers this? I remember seeing one on Amazon, maybe check into that. At the very least, write each letter 5 times lower and upper case in cursive. Then write out all your new words. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ChristopherTL Diglot Newbie United States transparent.com Joined 6470 days ago 12 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 7 of 15 19 March 2007 at 8:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Jerrod for the encouragement and the advice. I agree that I ought to be writing the alphabet out, and learning a small set of words to practice writing with, only to become comfortable with the alphabet, then expanding vocabulary.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6708 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 8 of 15 19 March 2007 at 9:54am | IP Logged | ||
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My simple advice is go here:
http://www.princeton.edu/russian/ It is the material for two years of Russian as taught at Princeton University. It's free, and all shades of awesome. Something like 200 chapters. I've gone through the first 35, so I'm not sure how far it will take you...but I get the feeling that it's the most thing complete thing outside of DLI. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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