ТАК ТОЧНО, ХОТЯ МЕДЛЕННО.
Thanks.
I’m in a similar situation in that I am trying to learn, largely self-taught. I have the New Penguin Book too, and like it. I am testing out the “RussianPod101” podcast…a perusal of iTunes showed that a lot of the podcasts, such as the Spoonful of Russian, aren’t being updated anymore (please correct me if I’m reading it wrong…). I liked to listen to the Pimsleur course while I was working out, as it allowed me to absorb some of the pronunciations that I couldn’t get from the Penguin book.
Also, If you are an iPhone user, there are a couple of apps that are good basic tools…I’m trying out “speakeasy Russian” now…its pretty basic, but as a good view of the cyrillic, the americanized written, and the translation, along with a button for an audio clip of the word or phrase. does anyone know if you can set up the iPhone to text or type in cyrillic? a text-pal or penpal situation might be fun to add to the learning, and interacting with others…
>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)
I strongly second manila’s recommendation. The faked-up English alphabet for pronouncing Russian is way worse than useless. It is no easier to learn than the Cyrillic alphabet, and it is not useful for anything
I took Russian in college and could struggle along in a conversation. The biggest challenge around the time that I finished school was mastering all the declensions. I understand the ideas well enough, and had learned some declensions before in high school Latin, but jeez! there are so damn many of them.
Well am currently in India, so I think I will have to wait till I’m back in the UK (just a few days now!). I doubt that Polish is in high demand over here… I should at least have the ‘practice with a native’ bit sorted though! 
I agree that a class would be ideal, but it wouldn’t be practical for me right now. Time and scheduling would be an issue, as would expense. For the moment, I’ll have to continue muddling along with other tools.
Ministre, you reminded me of a question I had: How important is it to learn the Russian script/cursive? My English script is atrocious–ever since taking a drafting class, I’ve made life easier on everyone by printing in block letters. Plus, the script alphabet is rather like a second alphabet on top of the cyrilic, with all of the difficulties that cyrilic presents repeated: namely, a mix of characters that look and sound like their English counterparts with those that look like English characters but are pronounced differently. (The ones that are completely foreign aren’t terribly hard to learn for me.) I assume that you meant to use the calligraphy for something like the printed Cyrillic.
Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions. 
I highly recommend the technique of falling head over heels for someone who doesn’t speak any English. Of course, depending on where the other person is from, you could end up with some funky regional accent (mine was Dagestani for a while, I’m told, but in the intervening years, it’s apparently worn off - most native speakers these days think I emigrated fom the former USSR as a small child).
Seriously, I can’t contemplate learning Russian from scratch without some kind of more formal instruction and conversation practice with native speakers. I had 3 years of college-level classroom instruction, with straight As, before I went to Russia, and I could still barely string a sentence together when I first got there.
How about volunteering with Russian speakers? HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) used to have a program that matched up volunteers with newly arrived families - you could mentor someone, or volunteer at a senior citizen’s program, or something like that. I’m sure some lonely grandma would be thrilled to have someone to chat with.
LawMonkey: You’re bang on right about Cyrillic cursive handwriting being almost a second script. The good news is - block print in Cyrillic doesn’t change its shape from upper to lower case except for the ‘A’, which is already a familiar shape and functions the same. The handwriting is quite different, but it is a standard form in Russian and functions rather like italic font in Roman characters, eg. if you look something up in the dictionary, it will say Plate: v. metallurgy to coat a surface with a metallic layer. If you can’t read the italics, you won’t be able to figure out the context in which to use that word. If you’ve taken Greek, it’s the same idea - the ‘handwriting’ font is used often, and it’s a real limitation if you can’t read it.
No, when I meant calligraphy, I meant using the cursive form of writing (harder to learn on your own, I grant you.) but writing slowly, carefully and beautifully with a calligraphic nib. Invaluable for remembering those F%$^%g soft signs… It’s an extremely useful way to memorize.
Oh, check if there’s a Russian Orthodox church in your neighbourhood. They can be a useful resource - no idea of your religious leanings, (don’t tell them if you’re an atheist or a protestant - I was well on the way to singing with the choir, but the priest didn’t want any heretics hanging around on his side of the altar!) but if you can attend, you’ll get some more exposure to the language.
Пожалуйста, мой друг.
You’re welcome, my friend.
Russians don’t normally print, so it’s not really an option like it is in English. If you plan on writing something by hand, or reading someone else’s handwriting, you really do need to learn it. Not necessary just to learn to read though, since most things are type-written.
Quoted for truth. If you’re going to learn to write in Russian and not just speak it, this is an essential skill. My cursive sucks no matter what language I’m writing in, but it just seems especially wrong to write in Russian using block letters.
The funny thing for me was, my English cursive is pretty bad, so I would often print. When I learned cyrillic cursive as an adult - and I guess learned it the right way - it came out really nice. My native instructors complimented me it looked native. Of course, after getting good at that, my English cursive become damaged beyond repair.
I think that’s the best way to learn any language–I’ll be on the lookout for any lonely Russian girls/boys. 
All this talk of how impossible it is to learn without taking a formal class is really encouraging me to be stubborn and do it solo. I can be stubborn that way. Honestly, if it were feasible, I’d do it, but a formal class isn’t in the cards right now. Best case scenario: One of my law school classmates is apparently fluent, and may be able to help.
Interesting idea about volunteering, though. I’m not sure if there’s much of a community here in Cincinnati. There’s a… um… Free Russian Center? or something like that in a roughish neighborhood, or at least a building with a sign that says that on it. googling Hmmm. Apparently it’s associated with Chabad? There’s also an Orthodox (sans geographical modifier) church up the street. Google reveals Saint George the Martyr Russian Orthodox Church not too terribly far away, also. I’m not religious myself, though I’m not hostile about it in most cases. Judaism intrigues me, Christianity is fine so long as they’re not tied up in all the lunacy of fundamentalism/evangelicalism. I’ve not had any contact with Hasidic Jews, though–how open are they to outsiders? Any idea on how to track down other opportunities? There’ll no doubt be more chance once I’m in New York.
Bit of a shame to hear that I can’t dodge the script, though. I’ll go back and work on in in a little while.
I didn’t learn it the right way and it looks like crap. I should take steps to fix that.
Yeah, half the time when I try to write cursive in English, it comes out half in Cyrillic. An astonishing proportion of my rent checks are signed in Cyrillic. I basically deal with it by printing in English and writing cursive in Cyrillic.
Yeah, I often start out writing in Latin letters and halfway through realized I’ve written my name as Каила. Then I just give up and write the little doohickey above the и. Can’t be spelling wrong in a language I didn’t intend to write in, you know?
My Cyrillic handwriting is pretty terrible, although my Latin cursive is very good. I think it’s because no one ever taught me - I taught myself from a 2nd grade cursive textbook. I still can’t write ж properly in cursive. But writing in block print looks ridiculous. No one writes like that.
Here is how: http://files.spoonfulofrussian.com/podcast/movies/letter05_08.mov ж is towards the end of the video.
All that said, we did not begin learning Russian cursive until the second year of college level Russian (picture 1st year which includes classroom 2x/week, group discussion time 2x/week, and mandatory language lab 1x/week, each week, for a year, plus quizzes, plus midterms, plus finals…).
You’ll get there when you get there. When you can easily read Russian print and are starting to be able to understand and create comprehensible full sentences, you can start worrying about cursive.
BTW, we spent an entire semester on “verbs of going” which is… just one of those things that seems strange about Russian to the English speaker.
PS - the feminine form of “horse” (loshad) is the more common way to speak of a riding or work horse. Makes sense because “masculine horses” (aka stallions) are rare in riding and work horses; most are female or neutered.
Probably why I had good penmanship, and why I don’t envy people having to learn it in college or on their own.
From the very first day, we were taught a group of letters, how to pronounce them, a list of words made from those letters, then how to write them with nightly homework assignments of memorizing the words and writing them 50-100 times.
As I understand it, Russian school children start writing what they can read pretty much from the beginning, too.
we had an engineer (in russia and the us) as a choir director for a while. oh, my, oh, my, was his printing wonderful!! totally block letters and oh, so easy to read. his musical writing was wonderful as well. so clear and crisp!
his cursive was fantastic as well. you could see the beginning and ending of letters so very, very, clearly.
mum forced me to go to russian school as a kid. we must have made loops and whorls and what nots in little gridded blue books for 6 years. each letter was gone over, and over, and over again in painstaking detail. my capital k,h,b, and p’s are mostly krillic shaped in english. it was a big russian bear learning to write russian and english at the same time.
and don’t even think about being lefthanded when writing in russian. i do hope they’ve loosened up in russia (i’ll have to ask in church on sunday) but here in church run u.s. russian schools (think big fat greek wedding when she had greek classes) there was no being a lefty.
so i wrote lefty in school, righty in russian school. my writing is rather bad in both languages (i can write english with either hand but russian only righty).
So, having signed up for livemocha it turns out that they have no instruction for Polish at all (they could have told me this before I signed up!)… So its back to trawling for podcasts I guess. Shame that my command of Polish isn’t good enough to send the b/f emails in Polish, as that would work as practice…
Well, having them speak some English does help with translating…