Thread: To All English Speaking Teachers and/or Learners of Russian!

Hello all! I am an American student who needs some insight. I began self studying Russian about two years ago. Because it was self study I had no idea at what level I spoke Russian. Well I began an intensive summer program 7 weeks ago, and tested into "intermediate high". We are now at the end of the program, and we have just finished declensions and usage of который, participles, gerunds, and prefixed/unprefixed verbs of motion. Most of the students in the class (myself included) had already at least somewhat studied these concepts, but we really focused on mastering them. My question to all of you is: Is the mastering (after already introducing) of such concepts 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year Russian? After this program I have to go back to self study for one year before I can transfer to a school that offers Russian. I want to know at approximately what level to pick up at. Furthermore, if anybody can help determine what level this is, what textbook/grammatical concepts would be appropriate? Thank you!

Pfffffff..... I think participles and gerunds and all that is at LEAST third year. When you say studying these concepts, do you mean gaining an understanding of them, or learning to apply them to all your vocabulary? Because understanding them doesn't really take a year in in my opinion, you should be fine.

Most of those things are just forms you already know, with a predictable change to the ending. And knowing when to use participles and gerund isn't too hard; you just don't in speech, and if you have the vocabulary, they probably are super flexible and delightful when writing. Honestly, basic conjugations and vocab are the real difficulties in learning russian solitarily to me.

From what I can tell, past passive and past adverbial forms are the end of the road. Maybe they would start in on formal speech from there? Even that isn't incredibly complicated, then again, it's school, so they'll take an entire year to teach it.
http://learnrussian.rt.com/grammar-tables/ If you know every concept on this list, I dont know of anything more advanced than this. I can't imagine what could be.

Thank you for your response! We started by introducing the concepts, and since there was some familiarity with them, we began to use them in practical ways, and did many exercises that helped to integrate them into our vocabularies. I knew just about every concept on that list, and I was told today by my teacher that there were no more grammatical concepts to learn, just improving my phraseology and vocab. I guess that settles that lol. Any idea what year I would likely test into based off my knowledge of grammar?