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Russian Read&Speak - TAC 2013 Team Mir | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4501 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 89 of 142 06 May 2013 at 11:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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My advice for Russian is to ditch textbooks for now and do some bilingual text reading,
L-R, even just chat on Skype or Verbling with people. I learned most of my Russian through conversation. What Assimil (and Colloquial Russian) did was to ensure my grammar was more or less in order, but in many cases (and this has surprised people before) my expressions are colloquial and automatic precisely because I've seen them 1000 times. In fact, after about 6,7 months of hitting the books, I found a friend on Interpals and we started chatting. I remember having to google translate and dictionary half her sentences at first, but after 3 months, it was less. We are now a year later and I still have to ask every once in a while "what does that word mean" but I can ask in Russian, get an explanation in Russian and we're done. This is why I can speak colloquial Russian and chat with people, but I can't really write long grammatically correct pieces of text without having to reread them 20 times for aspect use and sentence construction / word order. That latter is a problematic aspect, but it is something you can fix through hard work (not that it matters to me at the moment because I am not intending to become Pushkin, my colloquial semi-Russian is very useful in itself!!!) If you do this long enough, using Russian will feel automatic. I have friends which I would not otherwise have if I weren't able to speak Russian!! And that is what keeps me motivated, because I never hit a grammar book. I hate studying grammar. Edited by tarvos on 06 May 2013 at 11:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4850 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 90 of 142 06 May 2013 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
And location vs direction, and usage of ся, and correct spelling of foreign words (and their meaning), and many other things.
The problem is that a wrong sentence structure or word order can create much more problems for comprehension than, say, a wrong gender or a wrong case. Tarvos's advice is not useless, but you shouldn't abandon textbooks and grammar books. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4501 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 91 of 142 06 May 2013 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh I am sure I make plenty of other mistakes, but this is besides the point. I wouldn't
abandon them forever, but I would return to them once you've used them after getting a healthy dose of context. And perhaps it would be nice if you kept this log on-topic with advice for Expugnator instead of berating and belittling me. Edited by tarvos on 06 May 2013 at 1:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 92 of 142 06 May 2013 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you guys for the support. My situation with the Russian language is rather complex. I'm not very interested on it from a linguistical point-of-view, that is, it doesn't have the fun of discovering new features as there is with Georgian. From a practical, cultural and self-achieving point, though, I do want to learn it. So, I'm a bit impatient with this stage at which it's mostly about learning enough words to be able to translate a text not burning out by so much looking up at the dictionary.
I could try a conversational approach and reach this level faster, but that's not my need for Russian now. I want to be able to read language textbooks and, later on, contemporary fiction. That's why Read comes before Speak at my log's title, and writing and listening aren't even mentioned. I know Russian is one of the easiest languages to find people to practice with and help you out, but that's not what i need the most right now; maybe next year it will change, but, for now, chatting in Russian would mean mostly throwing in some Google Translator sentences. I'm taking this from the discussion I've had with Emme at her log, with minor changes: Just like the people who took the Assimil Experiment, I think Assimil is too breakneck for languages other than the commonly-learned Germanic and Romance ones. They pay attention on details like calling up previous words up to the first half of the book, but later then they assume the reader is already able to tackle litterature. I don't think I had enough training on conversation before moving on to litterature in either of the Assimils. I think I'm going for Living Language after Assimil, if I don't find any more fun textbooks. I like it, and the fact I own a physical copy of the Advanced one encourages me to try it. I don't want anything else on grammar, in fact I plan to skip any obvious grammar notes or the ones that wants me to learn by rote. There's also that book by Nina Potapova which seems to be useful. In fact, once I've been through the stage at which I've memorized the most essential words, I want to quickly go through beginner's textbooks in order to retain what I've learned. At this stage, it will be better to use textbooks with fewer lessons than Assimil and Linguaphone, for instance. Also, given that there is so much for Russian, i'd rather find a textbook I like other than struggling with grammar, vocabulary and bad didactics all at once. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 93 of 142 07 May 2013 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So, I'm having a bad time with Assimil but it's not the end of the world. I foresee using Nina Potapova's Breve Manual de Língua Russa, which is in Portuguese. That will boost my Russian learning as it will allow me to start with shorter translation lessons and focus only on the important vocabulary. I mean, I can easily skip words that I find less important in my native language. Those older textbooks have this drawback of coming up with less usual words and I think that's the way to overcome it.
I had better use Le Russe by Nina Potapova, that is, the French edition, which is more complete (almost twice as long), but it isn't available online and I've only seen it physically at the high school library. The high school I attended is closed now, a college is working at the same place. The doubt now is whether to start it after or before Le Russe (2008). I did want to try the easiest Assimil of all, just to get rid of this Assimil curse ^^ I need this feeling of using an Assimil book in a fun way. I'm going to need Assimil a lot more for other languages and I'm glad what it did for my French, my German and my Chinese, even though I had not so great experiences with Norwegian and Russian. Le Russe (2008) still has short lessons at lesson number 63, so I think it's much drier and clearly dumbed-down when compared to RWT and Il nuovo russo senza sforzo. Edited by Expugnator on 07 May 2013 at 11:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 94 of 142 10 May 2013 at 12:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm so eager about finishing Russian Without Toil that today I could do two lessons. I read lesson 79 early in the morning, when I woke up, still in bed. Then as I had to stay longer at work waiting for unifished business from other people I spent some time doing lesson 80. It was important for me to realize that, no matter how lost I am in terms of vocabulary and rushing to finish the book, it's still more rewarding to do the complete lessons, that is, with listening to the audio and writing down the answers to the exercises.
Still glad it worked today. I want to try to speed up this weekend by doing some lessons in read-only mode. Maybe in two weeks I can move on to Le Russe 2008, go quickly through the first lessons as I did with RWT and then finish it and move on to Nina Potapova. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 95 of 142 13 May 2013 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's still not one month since I did my last review/report of my learning activities oveall at this thread, but Monday is a calmer day and I think some impressions have changed greatly within these 28 days. I'm using the Russian thread as usual because it's my last addition to TAC 2013.
The great news was the highly active weekend. Not only did I keep up with Anki; I also managed to do 1 Linguaphone Norwegian lesson just through reading the main text and only looking up the words at the handbook much less often. I also read two or three Russian Assimil lessons, in my quest for getting rid of it ASAP. Plsu some Peng's characters. Bear in mind I don't monitor my results, but rather the learning process, that is, whether it's been fun or dreadful to study the language in this period. Chinese Status: FUN. It was a wise decision to take Méthode 90 for a second time. Now it's working more like the type of language resource I like: only about 5-10 words per each lesson. Since it was very tiresome to work through it at the first time, that means I learned quite a bit in the past months. I admit I'm anxious about finishing it soon, so I can pick up a resource with new information, and I regret the fact I have no means of acknowledging my level of Chinese. Sometimes I'm better at conversation and hanzi than I expect, but I accept the fact I'm still far from being able to reading a short text. As for Peng's Fun with Characters, I'm still at book 2 and it takes long by doing only 2 characters a day, but I've decided I should speed up with it by just reading the texts, that is, lately I haven't been looking up character by character and noting them down as I do. That takes away a bit of the fun, but it also leaves me more free time in my schedule. As for the Anki sentences, sometimes they are overwhelming in the sense that I can recognize only one or two characters, but I believe they set the base for what I run into later at other resources. English Status: FUN. I haven't written lately, but I'm still watching TV. It's getting easier, sometimes I can understand it normally even in the background. I've started reading my first novel in English, Max Barry's Jennifer Government. I'm glad it's an epub and I ca use iBook's built-in dictionary, because I've been looking up lots of words, more than for the French novel I'm reading now. French Status: FUN. I wrote a few paragraphs and got several corrections on each, most of them due to the nitpicky French way of correcting, by rewriting our sentences even when we mean something different that they want us to mean. I'm more or less off- schedule in terms of paragraph, 7 out of 20 and we're already in May, but that can be easily done, and I'd rather write more when I'm not so much pressed for catching up with reading. Speaking of which, I've started to speed up my rythm. I've started reading my second novel by Lorraine Fouchet, after reading a bibliography in the extensive, no-dictionary way. I'm looking word sup much less now, and I think the first book was really important for me. The words start to repeat themselves. I'm impressed that I have to look up much less words for French than for English, even if my English is supposed to be better; that serves to demonstrate that I'm on the right track by taking this approach of semi-intensive/still more intensive reading for my first native language materials. I want to try this on with Norwegian, and I more or less do so with Papiamento, not as much as I would like because I don't have a good dictionary for this language. Georgian Status: NEUTRAL to FUN. The rant season is over. I still think I'm taking too much on grammar and less on content, but it starts to pay off. I see the same grammar topics in 3, 4 books and the big picture starts to form. I'm getting used to reading the grammar Einführung in die Georgischen Sprache, it did wonders to my German too. As for the textbook in Russian, I'm still slow but it only gets better. I've decided to take no more than 1 page a day, and this speed has allowed me to learn the Russian vocabulary, the Georgian vocabulary and to understand the grammar explanations. The worst thing about having to look up nearly every word is that when you get back to your sentence you've completely lost track. That's why I'm not so much of the "native material-only" panacea and that's why only now I think I can try reading Georgian. And this reading is taking place at a magazine for which I got Georgian-Papiamentu-Portuguese editions. So, I'm still fairly slow at the Georgian, but I look up less words each day, and I'm starting to get the hang of the Georgian sentence. I've also written to some online penpals but I still find it difficult to move on to more complex subjects. Norwegian Status: FUN. I could basically repeat what I said last month, about the eagerness to start reading and the improvement I see with Anki. Today I did three double-sized Linguaphone lessons in a row, which accounts for 12 pages of reading, listening and looking up words. I use the dictionary less and less often. Papiamento Status: FUN. The main drawbacks are the lack of a good dictionary and of assistance by a native speakers. I don't have a consisten textbook anymore and so I've started tackling native materials all in a round. First a short video (a TV programme on the culture of Aruba), then a short fairy tale then my bilingual Papiamentu-Georgian reading. I've tried writing a paragraph to a friend who is an advanced learner and he said it was ok, only some style mistakes. Still, I don't know how to activate it without a native speaker to talk to. I'm travelling in 4 months and I don't want to waste my study just because I learned to read like a scholar but I couldn't retain enough daily vocabulary. Russian Status: DREADFUL. Hurrying up to finish RWT so I can move to the lighter Assimil 2008 and then to Nina Potapova's. There is still not enough vocabulary to try anything: bilingual reading, talking to a native. I don't have a slight clue about aspect or declensions, at least not actively. I still have the feeling the Russian language is a difficult task I have to accomplish. I know the rewarding will be great, specially when I manage to read it, as I don't care much about being able to speak it at this time. Anki sentences are still quite overwhelming and sometimes I can recognize no words at a sentence. I do hope it all gets better once I'll have been through the next two textbooks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 96 of 142 21 May 2013 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I carried on my plan for completing Russian Withmuch toil as soon as I could, and I seem to have suceeded. I wrote my final impressions at the Assimil Experiment Group log, but I have to say that those two Assimils helped me much little with Russian. I'm about to start over. I'm picking the newest Assimil because this one, though dried up/dumbed down, seems yet to fit my learning needs. Assimil should have made it a two-tome with the first one being 2008's Le Russe and the second one with all the literary excerpts and notes from the previous editions. Now, I want to do this one also very quickly and rush up to Nina Potapova's book. Russian is a language I need and am comitted to learning, despite the struggle I've always made at my previous attempts and the lack of a well-paced rythm at those two Assimils I've tried.
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