Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Let's learn a foreign language!

And God bless you!

I have been working through a book that is quite old - published in 1962. It uses the same approach as what I have heard about Rosetta Stone - that is, there are no translations. It just has Russian phrases under some pictures. I am about a fourth of the way through the book.

Here is the thing that is surprising - I am really enjoying it. When I am feeling stressed, or just frazzled, I sit down and study some Russian. I find it relaxes me. Kinda funny...

I suppose it is because I since I am focusing on something other than whatever is stressing me out, it has a calming effect.

Possibly due to Soviet Era brainwashing!

Ha! Well, considering when it was written...you could be right.

And too, now you can get paid to translate for Russian mafia arrested by the police here in the US. Ah, money and death threats if you don't keep silent. Sounds like our congress, don't it.

"Quite old," huh?

Whippersnapper.

Ha! Most of the Russian-teaching books I get from the library are fairly new. The book I am using is one I actually own. I picked it up maybe 20 years ago for maybe 50 cents and did virtually nothing with it. It is called "Look and Learn Russian," and I think it is better than any of the library books I have gotten. I still need the library for the cds, though.

Congratulations on your efforts to learn Russian! I took an intensive Russian course before I went to the Soviet Union in 1984 and learned enough to ask and understand directions. My big goal was to visit the house where Mikhail Bulgakov had lived in Kiev (not included on the tour), which I did get to. And of course now I hardly remember any of it. But it was great fun to learn a whole different alphabet.

The thing that keeps tripping me up is that some Russian letters look just like letters in our alphabet - but they make completely different sounds. The 'H' makes the 'N' sound, for example, and there are several others. I also think it is funny that the Russian word for brother is "brat."

I have been so happy with the book I have, today I ordered a book from the same series on learning French.

In a year or so, when I am proficient in German, Russian, and French (as well as English) I plan to disappear from my current life and live in seedy Eurpean towns and drink lots of cheap beer. Probably have crappy medical care, though...

I am still plugging away on the Russian. I am still amazed by how motivated I am to study this stuff. I can literally spend hour after hour just working on Russian. Maybe there is some brainwashing in the book after all.

Currently, I am working my way through this website:

http://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/getting_started.php

The site is really cool because most of the words and phrases have audio which lets me hear the word(s).

Oh, and I just found out today how to use a Russian font:

грфнылджэ йцуиь юэджфьтя

The above is meaningless, of course, because none of the keys on my keyboard are labeled with Russian characters. I either need a Russian keyboard or some stickers so I can tell what I am typing.

Of course, 5 minutes after I typed the above nonsense I found the Cyrillic keyboard mapping. Ah well...

My perserverence continues. Just today, I finally finished working my way through my first text on Russian. Now I have pages of notes, many vocabulary words to re-memorize, and tons of grammar rules to continue to attempt to decypher. Still, it is a work in progress. I do understand some basic Russian now. (Ok, maybe pre-school Russian.) Oh yeah:

я люблю читать по-русски!

It actually makes sense now.

The eventual goal is to someday be able to read a newspaper in Russian, and maybe toss down some Stolichnaya while doing it.

I am quite annoyed. Our local library has a set of CDs that teach a short course in Russian - the Pimsleur course. Anyway, after finishing the book I was working through, I thought I needed audio. I wanted to start pronouncing words the way a Russian would pronounce them. The problem is - the CDs don't work. I tried a few CDs in different CD players around the house, and none of them work.

I also just started studying French, too. Someday, I hope to be quadra-lingual. For what it's worth, I am finding French much easier than Russian.

So what's going on here?

Before I took the above-mentioned cds back to the library, my wife suggested that I try the cds in the van we bought last year. The funny thing is - they worked in the van. The van has the newest cd player, so I guess some of the new cds use a different format?

Does anyone know why new cds have to be played in a new cd player?

I had a semester of Japanese, but lack of practice has erased my knowledge.

New CDs in new CD player, I have the same problem. Maybe it has to do with the file format?

Sooo...I went looking at new CD players so I could play the Russian disks. I didn't find anything I wanted, and I chatted with the salesman and told him my tale of woe. He then asked me if I had tried the disks in a DVD player. I hadn't; it simply had not occurred to me. Soooo...

I got the disks back from the library, and they do indeed work on a dvd player. Go figure. Lot of trouble for some CDs that don't even have a sexy chick on the cover.

Our library system did not have Russian at first, but now it does. Mango has several languages one can pick from - including (shiver me timbers!) Pirate!

Practice makes perfect though, so have you found anyone to practice Russian with, Lance?

I've been trying to learn some dialects here - Hokkien (a Chinese dialect) and Ilokano (a Filipino one). Alas, I keep forgetting everything except "good morning".

Out of curiousity, IB, what is your mother tongue, what languages do you speak, and how well would you say you speak them?

I have not found anyone to practive Russian with. I am currently working my way through the Mango course (free to anyone with a library card!) which is helping immensely with pronunciation.

I try to review vocabulary words every day. Repetion is the mother of learning - at least as far as languages go.

Just for your amusement, here are some interesting things about Russian:

1) You can typically tell the gender of a noun by looking at it.

2) Russian has 2 sets of plurals - one plural form is used for the numbers 2-4 (and any number ending in those digits) and another plural form for numbers ending in other digits. There would also be a general form, which means Russian has 4 ways to say "rubles," and that is just in the nominative case.

3) Every multisyllable word in Russian has one accent, and you must know where the accent is to pronouce the word correctly. There are letters that change pronunciation depending on whether or not they are in an accented syllable.

4) Russian has 6 cases. (German has 4; does anyone know if French uses cases? Just curious.)

5) The Russian language uses declension on adjectives, pronouns, and nouns. With 3 genders plus plural and 6 cases, that means there could be as many as 24 different ways to say just one word.

No wonder all the info online said Russian was a difficult language. I am still gonna get it, though.

My mother tongue is English, which is unusual for someone living in the Philippines. My parents always hoped for me to eventually end up abroad, so they taught me English. I'd say I'm pretty fluent.

I speak Filipino fluently too, although we cheat a lot - most Filipinos nowadays mix English in too. I think that's why English-speaking tourists love us; we can be pretty easy to understand.

I speak Mandarin well enough that when I've gone to Beijing, the natives were pleasantly surprised at my competence.

I know a few words and phrases of Japanese, Hokkien, Ilocano, French and Bahasa Indonesian, but they're all just hello, goodbye, and thank you so I wouldn't count them.

I admire your persistence, lance! Good for you. I'm good with three languages at the moment, though - right now I want to focus on learning how to ride a bike!

Thanks for the quick background on Russian. Good heavens, that makes me admire you even more!

Ib, do you also read Mandarin?

I am curious about something too - how do orientals use keyboards? Do they type a phonetic representation of the words?

You don't know how to ride a bike? I am surprised by this.

I have also been impressed by my persistance. I can't believe I am finding this so interesting!

Sigh, I keep forgetting to check the Anywhere Machine.

Yeah, well... most of the kids who went to my high school don't know how to ride bikes, either. I blame it on a combination of the dangerous streets of Manila and the sheer amount of homework we had to do.

I do read Mandarin, and there's a system called pinyin that phonetically "translates" all the characters into English. Highly useful for those who know both Mandarin and English.

I also heard there are keyboards which have Mandarin characters, but I have no idea how to use them. I think some of them use the characters that tell you how to pronounce a word.

I know other keyboards also have word "roots". The majority of Chinese characters can be broken down into simpler "parts", much like a compound word in English.

I finally finished the Mango Russian course, which is offered (free!) on our library's home page.

I try to read some of a Russian newspaper each day. I get a little excited when I find a few words I can read!

I have also been watching some cartoons:

http://www.disney.ru/

Kinda fun! Pooh speaking Russian just cracks me up!

I definitely need to keep trying to improve my vocabulary, though.

So I took the kids to the park today. They were playing, and I sat down on a bench to watch them. The lady sitting next to me said something to her kids...and I noticed from her accent she obviously did not grow up in Kentucky. I chatted with her a bit, and it turned out she was from Belarus, and her mother tongue is..Russian! I spoke with her a little bit in my pathetic Russian, and she was impressed that I knew any at all.

I was in a pretty good mood all day just because it was so cool to find someone to speak to in Russian!