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Michel Thomas & Rosetta Stone for Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| ColdBlue Groupie Angola Joined 6383 days ago 40 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 8 16 August 2008 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was wondering if this would be a good combination to achieve basic fluency in Russian. I've heard that Rosetta Stone if very good for learning a ton of vocabulary, and the Michel Thomas Method was wonderful at drilling down the grammar of a particular language. So would combining the two be a very successful route by going through the Foundational and Advanced courses of MT and then completed all three levels of RS V3?
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| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5897 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes  5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 8 17 August 2008 at 1:27am | IP Logged | ||
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It won't be enough. Michel Thomas is a great introduction and will give you a good idea of the language's syntax, but it really just taps into Russian's dense grammar. As for RS...well, in theory it's got tons of vocab, but...in my experience the vocab hasn't really stayed with me very well. Maybe if you really dedicate to the method and be persistent it'll work, but I just found it mind-numbing after a while.
The closest thing to a one-stop shop for Russian is the Princeton course. The author put it online for public access, and it covers essentially all the grammar (in particular, it has a great system for learning verbs), and also has tons of vocabulary, both practical and literary. It's got everything from "That girl over there is attractive, don't you think?" to Pushkin. Plus, it starts with a detailed guide to pronunciation, there are great audio files for all 200+ lessons, and it's got great exercises all the way through. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ColdBlue Groupie Angola Joined 6383 days ago 40 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 8 17 August 2008 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've looked into the Princeton course, and it just seems like something that is better used in a classroom than for self study. It might be good... but just not something I really want to use. With just MT/RS would I be able to just start listening to Russian radio and watching Russian movies to "pick up" more of the language?
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| BGreco Senior Member Joined 6203 days ago 211 posts - 222 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish | Message 4 of 8 17 August 2008 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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No. With other Michel courses (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch), that would probably be enough, but the Russian course won't get you even close to being able to listen to/watch movies.
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| ColdBlue Groupie Angola Joined 6383 days ago 40 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 8 17 August 2008 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | ||
Well I'm not talking about just the Michel Thomas course alone, but also completing all three levels of Rosetta Stone on top of it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BGreco Senior Member Joined 6203 days ago 211 posts - 222 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish | Message 6 of 8 17 August 2008 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, and that still won't get you even close to being able to watch Russian T.V.
Do the Princeton course if you're really serious about learning Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5897 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 8 18 August 2008 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
I haven't had much success with RS. Like I said, it's got a lot of vocabulary in it, but I've found it difficult to remember things (even after doing all the activities), and I found that it would get tedious/boring pretty quickly. Potentially, it could work, but I wasn't impressed with it. Michel Thomas is cheap and pretty user-friendly, so there's no harm in starting with that, but I really think the Princeton course is the way to go. I had downloaded it a year ago and I understand why you might be hesitant to use it. The early lessons look pretty complicated, what with long paragraphs, tables, and diagrams. But trust me...if you push yourself through those early lessons, things will go smoothly shortly therafter. Those first lessons mainly serve to explain the course's notation system for pronunciation and conjugation. It definitely seems confusing at first glance, but it makes your life MUCH easier. Lastly, make sure your expectations are realistic. It's gonna take a lot of work to be able to understand Russian on a reasonable level (And I think that goes for any language; Spanish or French might be more accessible, but I think it'd still take at least a year before you could generally understand those). To give you an idea of what to expect: The two biggest obstacles are to learn the 6 grammatical cases and to become comfortable with verbal aspect (the concept of finite versus on-going action). Without understanding those "basics", then you won't really understand anything complicated. After that, your main task is to build your vocabulary, and...unfortunately, grammar and vocabulary sometimes overlap . A good example is Russian's motion verbs. In most languages, "I went to my friend's house" is a pretty simple sentence. In Russian, just to give a proper translation of the verb "to go", you need to consider how you went there, whether you went there and came back, whether you simply dropped by in passing, and I'm sure there are some things that I'm forgetting. (There is a relatively basic way of saying that, but the more you know of the language, the more realize that there are tons of nuances that need to be considered to properly express that idea.) And the vocabulary and grammar decisions needed to describe dropping someone off? Mind-boggling specific. I don't say that to scare you, but just to make it clear that it there's a lot of things you have to learn to really be functional, and it takes lots of studying. (I personally don't mind reading grammar books, but for some it could be tiring). The good news is that once you get over those first obstacles I mentioned (case and aspect), the language generally becomes 10x easier. Anyways, good luck. Edited by chelovek on 18 August 2008 at 8:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6249 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 8 18 August 2008 at 4:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I second what chelovek has said. Russian is a more difficult language to get a reasonable level in passive understanding in than any other Romance, Slavic, or Germanic language I've encountered. It has an extremely nuanced grammar, tons of exceptions, and is spoken in a slurry way with severe vowel reduction even at the highest registers. Worse, the vowel reduction relies on the stress, which is mobile (that is, different syllables are stressed in different forms of the same word; worse yet, I'm yet to find an approach better than "just learn them one by one", as it's so irregular); this is a definite barrier to understanding at first. The compound verbal affixes defy easy description, though chelovek's comments on "I went to a friend's house" start giving a taste of them.
Putting in a level of effort similar to what I put in with Polish, my Russian is still far worse, despite it being my second Slavic language and having tons of cognates and structural similarities with Polish. I haven't looked at Princeton Russian yet, but I may well do so. I've heard that the Assimil Russian course from the 1970s is also exceptionally good, but I haven't had the pleasure of seeing it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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