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chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish
| Message 1 of 26 15 January 2014 at 5:51pm | IP Logged |
Hello. Beginning this log I am an A0/A1 learner of Russian.
Log plan:
I will update once in the middle of each month for 12 posts in total.
I will post a monthly screenshot of my Excel planner. The green and yellow tide is coming!
I call my study strategy "Maximum Diversity". I am using around 20 different sources to learn Russian from. That's why there are so many columns and boxes in my planner. I try everything and use whatever seems to work the best. I used this method when studying German last year. I have already discovered some superb Russian resources on the web, and as I go, I will sort the wheat from the chaff and discard my least useful resources. At some point in the log I may share some methods, tips and links.
Let the learning commence...
1 person has voted this message useful
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish
| Message 2 of 26 15 January 2014 at 5:51pm | IP Logged |
Resources I'm using (or haven't started yet).
I can't be bothered making everything a link.
Books
Penguin Russian Course - J.L.I. Fennell (1965 edition)
Essential Russian Grammar - Brian Kemple (1993)
Жили-Были... 28 уроков русского язика (pdf)
(Русские Рассказы - dual language ed. Gleb Struve)
Courses
http://learnrussian.rt.com/lessons/ I rate this one very highly, especially the voice acting!
Hugo Russian in 3 Months (pdf/mp3)
FSI - Russian FAST (pdf/mp3)
Assimil 2011 (pdf/mp3)
(Princeton SLA101 (pdf/mp3))
Vocabulary
http://www.memrise.com/course/359/beginners-russian/ Better than Anki?
http://www.memrise.com/course/49168/common-russian-vocabular y/
http://www.memrise.com/course/112812/a1-a2-phrases-for-getti ng-used-to-russian/
Grammar
http://masterrussian.com Dip in and out as needed
http://russianlessons.net
http://conjugaterussianverbs.com/list-of-all-verbs/
Reading
http://english.franklang.ru/index.php?option=com_content&vie w=category&id=1&Itemid=8 Ilya Frank's bilingual stories
(http://www.russianlife.com/russianlife/uchites/) Looks interesting
http://www.russianlessons.net/articles/index.php Useful
http://www.lingocracy.com Clever reading tool, recommended
http://www.odaha.com/antoine-de-saint-exupery/maly-princ/mal ien-kii-prints Le petit prince - in Russian on the net!
Podcasts
http://www.russianpod101.com Subscription-based, 90% English
http://www.tasteofrussian.com In Russian with detailed vocabulary explanations
http://ochenporusski.com Difficult native podcast
(http://www.govoriporusski.com)
(http://russianpodcast.eu)
Videos
http://russian.dmll.cornell.edu/brtf/films.htm Old but well-annotated films
http://www.youtube.com/user/RusskogoYazyka/videos?shelf_id=3 Wacky Soviet videos!
(http://www.youtube.com/user/ThisIsHoroshoEng/videos)
(http://nclrc.org/webcasts/russian/index.html)
Other
http://russiangram.com Web tool that adds stress marks to text
http://morpher.ru Declines those nouns for you
http://russian.lingualift.com/blog/best-russian-learning-res ources/ Bucket list
Edited by chokofingrz on 17 May 2014 at 3:14pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish
| Message 3 of 26 15 January 2014 at 5:52pm | IP Logged |
January in a nutshell:
So far I have generally been working on introductory basic phrases from a variety of courses and websites. Covering things like как дела; меня зовут Мартин; доброе утро; спакойной ночи; сколько тебе лет; когда твой день пождения. Also focusing on passive exposure to the sound of Russian via podcasts, films, music videos and TV, very little of which I understand unless it has subtitles. Grammar is not really of great concern yet as I have so little vocabulary.
I am pleased with my current level of progress and motivation. I haven't written much yet apart from the TAC intro but you can't rush these things.
Achievement list:
- Completed beginner's mini-book "Say It In Russian"
- 2 chapters of Penguin Russian Course
- 1 chapter of Hugo tapes
- 1 chapter of FSI: geography + weather report
- 150 words refreshed and 15 phrases planted in Memrise
- 25 questions studied on RussianPod101
- 1 video unit of Russkogo Yazyka on YT
- 1/2 a Yeralash video with transcription from Cornell.edu
- 3 podcasts "listened to"
- 2 TV episodes (как я встретил вашу маму)
- Signed up for 12-week evening class
Biggest hurdles so far:
- (By far) the pronunciation of the letter o as 'o' or 'a'. This has already thrown me so many times when trying to write words I hear, or speak words I see written down. Familiar words are better though.
- In general, trying to reconcile the spelling and pronunciation of words, which is sometimes counterintuitive. Sometimes I wonder if my brain needs to be making space for a double entry for each word, to keep the spelling and pronunciation separate. I can't hear much of a difference between и, ы, ий, ый.
- Seeing a large chunk of cyrillic text still has a daunting effect, causing me to switch off. I can read the words but it takes minutes not seconds.
Biggest triumphs so far:
- Listening to a podcast and hearing some words or phrases pop out - even if it's only как дела.
- Same with texts, whenever I recognise a word instantaneously it's another little victory.
- I'm already consistently typing known words correctly using the Cyrillic keyboard mapping. It's not that hard! I think that memorising the lengths of words (e.g. ______(8)) will suit my crossword-loving brain.
Next month:
- Starting my weekly class
- Bringing my much-valued "500 words" from Memrise back to full retention
- I hope to locate some easy reader texts
"Я люблю, когда план приходит вместе!"
Edited by chokofingrz on 15 January 2014 at 5:58pm
7 persons have voted this message useful
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4857 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish
| Message 4 of 26 15 January 2014 at 8:15pm | IP Logged |
Very interesting sources. Could you post a link to Русского языка?
1 person has voted this message useful
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4770 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish
| Message 5 of 26 16 January 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged |
chokofingrz wrote:
"Я люблю, когда план приходит вместе!" |
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I hope you do realize that this expression isn't idiomatic in Russian. The most commonly used Russian translation of Hannibal's catchphrase seems to be "Я люблю, когда план сходится!" Anyway, ambitious-looking plan! Дерзайте!
Oh, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the pun in the log's title, especially with me being kind of a brony and all. On the plus side, I guess that proves that I'm not a slave to orthography - the unstressed о didn't even register as an "o"-sound to me!
3 persons have voted this message useful
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian
| Message 6 of 26 16 January 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged |
vonPeterhof wrote:
Oh, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the pun in the log's title,
especially with me being kind of a brony and all. On the plus side, I guess that proves
that I'm not a slave to orthography - the unstressed о didn't even register as an "o"-
sound to me! |
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Wow, I totally missed that. Having a child with a severe MLP:FIM obsession, I probably am
just about as familiar with the show and everything relating to it as most bronies out
there...and yes, I think vowel reduction is the culprit here.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4232 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek
| Message 7 of 26 16 January 2014 at 6:19pm | IP Logged |
This Excel sheet looks so motivating! Good luck with your studies, help is always here :)
1 person has voted this message useful
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish
| Message 8 of 26 14 February 2014 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
February in a nutshell:
It has been a productive month for Russian. Since starting my weekly class and finding the right web courses to learn from, my grammar and speech is coming on in leaps and bounds (relatively speaking). I think I'm making solid progress through A1 - always one of the most satisfying stages of learning. I still think I could find more time to put into it though (currently around 6-8h/week).
Achievement list (from most to least useful):
- 15 lessons completed on LearnRussian.RT.com
- 4 x 90 minute "Beginner Plus" classes attended
- 550 old words refreshed and 100 new words added on Memrise
- 4 more levels of A1-A2 phrases planted on Memrise
- 4 more chapters of Penguin Russian Course
- 3 short texts ("islands") written
- 10 units of Zhyli-Byli coursebook + exercise book whizzed through
- around 45 lessons on RussianPod101
- only 2 chapters of Hugo
- only 2 chapters of FSI Russian Fast
- a few bits and bobs in Videos
Material covered:
Basic phrases, numbers, telling time, dates, essential vocabulary, noun genders & plurals, past present and future tenses, accusative case, genitive case, хотить, мочь & должен, why & because.
Biggest hurdles so far:
- I make the most mistakes relating to cases because I'm only just getting to them. Accusative and Genitive, I have decent awareness of but little ability yet declining the necessary adjectives and nouns. The other cases are still to be introduced.
- I'm still finding most interesting audiovisual materials too fast or vocab-rich to process. Meanwhile, many of the teaching videos are far too slow. I do really like the RT.com audio exercises, and I will try to get into Assimil soon.
- Spelling is improving I guess - patterns are being memorised but -ий/-ый/-и is now more of a problem than о/а!
Biggest triumphs so far:
- I'm easily top of my class, have perfect attendance, and I even made a spontaneous grammatically-correct joke which made the teacher laugh.
- Getting 100% on LearnRussian.RT.com lessons is difficult but very satisfying! I'm really pleased that there are enough quality lessons there to keep me going for months.
- I really enjoyed attempting to translate my Russian song into English for the TAC challenge.
Next month:
- Focus more on podcasts, videos and audio tapes
- Get better with cases, also learn more prepositions
- Read Ilya Frank's bilingual stories
"сначала я был боящийся, я был напуганный... но я буду выживать!"
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