Learning Russian--any advice?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, sort of on a whim, I’ve decided to learn to speak Russian. The idea struck me as a way to check out livemocha.com, and I’ve been having fun with it, so I seem to be sticking with it so far.

I’ve already figured out that livemocha’s instruction, at least for Russian, leaves a bit to be desired, so I’ve picked up a book (The New Penguin Russian Course) and some flashcards. There’s also the Spoonful of Russian podcast, a Russian music podcast, and some links to Russian radio and TV that a friend gave me.

Do you folks have any advice? Either learning techniques that might be helpful, things that are tricky and I should be aware of… anything at all like that.

And a final question: Is there any realistic hope, if I keep at it, of having sufficient knowledge to make a trip to the Russian Federation possible in, say, Sept. 09 or so? I don’t mean fluency. Just, as someone in another thread said, enough to get where I’m going, order meals, and hassle pretty girls in bars. :slight_smile: I figure Moscow or St. Petersburg would make an interesting and unusual bar trip…

2

The grammar’s a bear. I hope you like declensions. And tongue-twisters.

That said, I like Russian and enjoyed my studies of it. It’s really hard though. You don’t get any breaks, not like a Western European language where there are lots of cognates.

I have no study hints, but it would help if you could join a conversation club or something–any real-life interaction is good.

3

In Soviet Russia, the language learns you.

4

But is it a dancing bear?

I took ancient Greek during my last year of undergrad, so declensions aren’t new to me. Actually, when I was learning Greek, I found that learning the declensions and the emphasis that they placed on grammar and parts of speech actually improved my English grammar significantly. Is Russian loosey-goosey with word order like (ancient) Greek? As I recall, other than the end of sentences being used for emphasis, Attic Greek let you do whatever you wanted with word order–it was kind of fun to make bizarro (from an English point of view) sentences, but it always felt like almost like a logic puzzle; it was never intuitive. (Then again, I only took a year’s worth.)

Conversation’s a good idea. I’m not sure what will be available here, but googling reveals a Russian deli that might be worth checking out. I’ll also contact the Russian department–well, the professor(s) who teach Russian–here at my school to see if they have any suggestions.

5

Everybody learns differently, but if you’re anything like me, I recommend taking a class. I tried teaching myself Spanish for years and got nowhere. Most independent learning resources focus on vocabularly that you soon forget and you never learn how to put your own sentences together. I just finished my second class in less than a year and I’m nowhere near fluent but I can put sentences together, converse haltingly with Spanish-speakers, order at restuarants, follow telenovelas, etc.

Russian is a whole different beast and I would expect a class in that language to benefit even more than my Spanish classes have. I was shocked at how many cognantes Spanish and English have; you will find very few in Russian. One of my closest friends is Russian and I’ve visited him in his home country twice. The little Russian I picked up was hard to make sense of and even harder to pronounce.

I’d guess that if you’re average you haven’t got a prayer of stringing 3 words together in Russian by Sept 09 (really only slightly exagerrating there), but if you’re particularly tenacious or just have a knack for languages, you can do it.

6

I don’t speak Russian, but I do speak Bulgarian, which is…well, fairly closely related. (I can understand about 10% of spoken Russian, way more of written. Native Bulgarian speakers claim to be able to understand a lot more than this.) If the word order is anything alike, then yes, it’s all wacky. This is my #1 favorite thing about Bulgarian. It makes me feel like Yoda. “Yes, happy I am! Weather the very is lovely today, isn’t it?”

Actually, a good friend of mine in Bulgaria LOVES Star Wars and once I asked her if the Bulgarian subtitles show him to speak in a really weird order, and she said yes. I expect it’s just a direct translation from English - that would look crazy to Bulgarians!

7

[Russian MMA fighter] Andrei Arlovski describing one of his opponents: "He is a very jiu jitsu good player. "

8

Ah, the Penguin New Russian course… good times, good times! You could do a lot worse than that there book - though I hope it’s been updated since I used it back in '86! I especially liked it because they had all the answers in the back of the book so you could check your progress and try to tease out why the language did what it did. Their explanations were also quite clear, as I recall.

You might also check out the Teach Yourself series, which I’ve sworn by in almost all my autodidactic polyglot efforts. Start with the Beginner’s Russian; then move to the Russian Conversation book if you’re trying to achieve enough of a level of fluency to make a decent barhop in Moscow or St. Petersburg, or go with the full-on Russian book if you want to make this more of a long-term project. Finally, never underestimate the value of a good dictionary! The Oxford line would be a good starting investment - one of the smaller editions will probably suit you quite nicely.

Конечно, если хочешь, пиши мне. С удовольствием тебе помогу.

9

A related question – is livemocha any good? I’m considering it as a way of re-learning Polish, or at least a supplemental method – I intend to pick up the Teach Yourself books when I’m in the UK, but given how much time I spend at the computer, something online may be helpful too…

10

Okay, I enjoy trying to figure out Russian. The first bit looks like it has something to do with horses, but that doesn’t make sense. Anyway, пиши мне probably means “write to me”. The second sentence is definitely “I’d be happy to help you”, or literally, “With pleasure you I help.”

How close am I?

11

I’ve found in the past that classes are useful for two main reasons: they offer the opportunity to speak and hear the language spoken properly, and they provide structure and discipline. They’re both important–if I had nothing but my New Penguin Russian Course, I’d have no chance of pronouncing anything correctly. I could probably learn to read Russian with it, but not to speak it. Similarly, previous attempts to self-teach languages have failed when I lost interest, and didn’t have the structure of a class five days a week to keep me on track. So far, livemocha has helped on both fronts: the exercises include audio, and I have fun reviewing people’s English and hearing their comments on my Russian, so I keep going back. Only time will tell if I can keep it up, though.

The book appears to date from 1996. I’ve only just started delving into it, but other than its somewhat Anglocentric orientation, with lots of UKian place names, it seems to be quite serviceable. It does seem to have a fairly rigorous approach, focusing more on grammar and usage than phrases–just fine by me. I’ll keep the ty books in mind, too–I picked this one based on the glowing reviews on Amazon.

Its great strength, as I mentioned, is that it offers you a way to link up with native and more experienced speakers who ‘grade’ your work and can offer conversational opportunities, pointers, and so on. I’ve been a bit disappointed in the lessons themselves, though. Rather than starting with the alphabet, the first lesson launched right into words and very simple (“The man is tall,” etc.) sentences. Without knowing the sounds behind the letters, its very difficult to learn the written language–you’re left trying to memorize hunks of rather meaningless characters. Almost the first thing I did was hunt down a website that introduced the Russian alphabet to supplement my learning. It also failed to introduce, or even mention, the concept of grammatical gender. So, when I tried to write simple sentences, I had mismatched genders throughout–I was just using the forms as they had been introduced in the lesson. The writing exercise also asked you to describe people using two characteristics–e.g., “The man is rich and tall”–but the lesson had never introduced the word ‘and.’ Finally, the speaking exercise used words and forms that hadn’t been introduced in the lesson. Not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, but it’s very difficult to sound words out if, again, you haven’t been introduced to the alphabet.

All of that said, I’d recommend giving it a try. It’s free, so there’s really nothing for you to lose. The Polish lessons may be better, for all I know, and even with its flaws, its still a helpful tool.

12

Cool. I’ll give it a poke around. I have some basic Polish (learnt a good 5 or so years ago), know the alphabet and can pronounce the letters etc, so I guess even if the alphabet isn’t introduced I may get some use out of it and it looks like it may be useful. What’re the speaking lessons like and what sort of feedback does one get on them?

13

Oh, you did Greek hm? Well that will probably help. I found my Russian to be very useful in learning Latin actually, since the grammar is a bit similar with the declensions and all.

14

If you studied Greek, Russian’s really not totally different from other European languages once you get past the alphabet.

I studied Russian in the military and went on to become a Russian interpreter.

We learned the alphabet in small groups of letters, instead of cramming the whole alphabet in at once. You don’t have to learn too many letters to read and say “tom tank,” “there’s the tank.” Or, “vot bank” “here’s the bank.” It gets you reading and saying comprehensible things right away, then you gradually add more letters, and consequently more words made from those letters. And there are a lot of cognates a beginner can use to form simple sentences, but they’re mostly nouns, not verbs.

Sorry, I can’t post in cyrillic from Safari.

15

Good luck.

I learned my russian through working several years in Azerbaijan and then on the pipeline in Georgia. Sole western expat in West Georgia so I had to speak russian. A tip. Learn to use the cyrillic alphabet straight away. ( if you don’t and write transliteration then at some time you will need to unlearn your transliteration)

Its not so much a difficult language as completely different to other languages I had up to that time studied. Its not a case of thinking what you want to say in english then translating. Lots of phrases are not direct translations of english phrases. for example. ‘I like’ is said as ‘It is pleasing to me’ ’ me and my wife’ is ’ me with my wife’ Some words that we have like ‘another’ are more precise in russian as they will differentiate between another as in again and another as in a differerent type. Lots of examples that your studies will reveal.

Nouns decline feminine masculine and neuter but if you are speaking to a woman then you have to adopt a feminization of verbs too (especially in the past tense) ‘Where were you’ to a guy - Ti gde buil? to a woman ti gde buila? Word order is flexible and the grammatical case decides the sense of the sentence

On the good side there are only two past tenses a continuous and perfective. (okay in literary russian there are exceptions)

But for me a westerner it was and is fascinating and rich.

Good luck

16

If your language questions have been answered can I make a slight hijack and counsel a little about visiting Russia especially St Petersburg (Petera) and Moscow.

Petera is an amazing city its Putin’s town. So Baroque its amazing. kinda makes you understand why they had a revolution. However it is seeing a rise in neo nazi street violence in recent years. (an 8 year old Azeri girl was kicked to death on the streets last year by thugs) Its a shame to the millions of soviets who died fighting nazism for this to be rearing its ugly head.

Moscow I found to be depressing and expensive. Taxis when I was last there (2000) were almost non existent. You just flagged down some random dude and if he wanted he would take you to where you wanted to go for an agreed price.

I have been to Vladivostok in Russian Far East and although it had a lot of poverty problems the girls were amongst the most beautiful and friendly on the planet.
hijack over

17

I guess it really is like riding a bicycle. I haven’t used my Russian for years, but understood this!

I agree with the suggestion of “finding a place to converse.” Maybe somebody at the OP’s local Russian deli would agree to participate. I well remember my formal classroom and language lab study of Russian, but I also remember really starting to learn the language when I lucked into being able to converse regularly with a local Russian family. That was a big help.

18

Don’t be sad. Two out of three ain’t bad. I can see where you thought the first bit might be about a horse (конь) but it’s not. It means ‘of course’.

On a side note, the imperfective and the perfective are not used just in the past tense - but that’s a topic for intermediate users, not beginners. So don’t sweat that particular detail just now.

Angua - don’t know where in this wide ol’ world you’re located, but the TY books are readily available here in the States. Any large bookstore will have a whole complement of 'em.

…speaking of which, I gotta go see if the Yiddish title has been released yet…

19

Yes - I have more advice than any sane person could possibly tolerate. You have been warned. In no particular order -

A class of some sort is an excellent idea. I’ve no notion what might be available in your location; 1st year University course, community college, Berlitz (or its moral equivalent), tutor… you’re better off with someone who can spot an error right away and correct it. I actually believe that a non-native teacher is slightly better for grown-ups, because they, too, have had to learn the language by the rules. Native speakers of any language will not necessarily explain the language through its grammar.

Among the big advantages of a class - there’s the ‘pressure’ of having to get your homework done, there’s the ability to learn from others’ mistakes, the possibility of study groups, the constant grading of homework and tests to let you know what you need to work on. You can learn without these advantages, but you have to be an incredibly disciplined person.

Some books to help - Barron’s has a 501 verbs book, the textbook I worked from was Troika, other useful books include English grammar for students of Russian, 2001 Russian idioms, , [URL=“http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Learners-Dictionary-Words-Frequency/dp/0415137926/ref=pd_sim_b_25”]Russian Learner’s Dictionary 10,000 words in order of importance.

Roots of the Russian Language was useful later on, likewise Russian Stories Dual Language.

This is one area where that suggestive selling thing of Amazon’s is kinda cool and useful, by the way.

Podcasts - I’m still looking for some middle ground here. There the ‘Learning Russian’ by Olga Mitchell, and ‘One Minute Russian’ with Anne on the Radio Lingua Network. Then there are the news programs, Хроника Дня produced by Deutche Welle and the Russian News from NHK - all of the above are available through iTunes. The first two are pretty elementary, and the second two are news broadcasts for native speakers and therefore, kinda hard to follow.

[levdrakon - in Safari, go Edit>Special Characters to bring up the Character Palette. In the view window, click “All Characters”, scroll down to “European Scripts” and Cyrillic is the second one down between Greek and Armenian. You can then mouse-type in Cyrillic, but it’s a drag for big documents…]

Get some Calligraphic writing equipment; it doesn’t have to be expensive, it can be just a holder, some flat steel nibs and a bottle of ink. If you practice writing slowly and beautifully, the kinetic sensation of writing will help you learn the words. It is a totally different sensation from typing, which I don’t particularly recommend. (When Dvorak went to simplify the keyboard, his goal was to put the most frequently used digraphs on the homerow, the next - to - most frequently used on the upper row and the least frequently used on the bottom row. Whether he succeeded in that or not, that’s another question for another place, but please accept that that’s what he was trying to do, for the sake of this sidetrack. A Russian keyboard seems to work on the assumption that the most frequently used single letters should be under the index fingers, then the middle fingers, then the ring fingers and finally the pinkies. It’s the antithesis of ergonomic touch typing, and you’re (almost) better off using two fingers.)

Music - Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava and Alexander Galich are the best known of the Russian Bards and some of their stuff is easy, even for a beginner, to follow or sing along with. (Don’t try to sing like Vysotsky or you’ll grind the vocal cords right outta yourself!)

That’s all for now, but I have more if you’re interested. Үдачи и всего хорошего.

20

I’m not sad, it tickles me that I can decipher a language I’ve never studied for a day at all. I think if I ever decide to learn Russian, it would be quite easy for me…although I don’t know from cases. Bulgarian/Macedonian is the only Slavic language without them.