Quote Originally Posted by ang12el
Ok I will speak in English this forum says "Russian Only" now seeing as this is the only forum I can ask for a link to Russian Music I had to write in Russian
I think you could also ask in the General forum...
But really the problem is not that your Russian was bad -- I've seen a lot of bad posts on this forum as well, and no one made fun of them. The problem is that is was bad _in a particular way_, in a "which watch?--six watch" kind of way (check the jokes in the thread I linked too, as you see, Russians find it rather funny even when they are doing it themselves). Which suggested the use of an online translator (or maybe a literal word-to-word translation). Online translated Russian is known to often be quite hilarious and I've seen quite a few chain joke emails with quotes from those.

So these jokes here are more on the online translator, than on you. Well, maybe just a little bit on you, but you now realize how bad the translators are, and won't do it again, would you? and when your Russian improves, you'll read this thread again and have good fun.

Now, some of my (personal and subjective) suggestions as to what you could actually do to start posting in (bad, at first) Russian now, or very soon:

1. Do check out the links I gave above

2. Get a book with a nice summary of Russian grammar with examples, or several of them. I do not really know which ones are out there, but other learners might help you here. You are looking for something that is not too detailed, and has examples for everything. Browse through the book, or read the preface -- the point is for you to understand a few basic things about how the language works, the cases, the "sovershennye/ nesovershennye" verbs, how the subject and object often switch from English (e.g. "ona mne nravitsja"="I like her", but it is SHE who is doing the action in the Russian sentence, not me). Just quickly browse through the explanations without actively learning all the endings and stuff first. The main point is for you to realize that a few things work differently and that you should be careful trying to translate your sentences into Russian.

3. Get a good learners' dictionary -- again, go for the one with the largest number of examples, the number of entries is not quite so important now. If you do not know how to write something in Russian, look for a similar expression here, or among the examples in the book from p.2. This will also teach you something useful.

4. When needed, you may have to look up single words in online/large paper dictionaries. Before putting them in, make sure that you are confident that this is where the word should go in and the form the word should take.

5. For expressions that you are not confident in try using Google (not yandex as it will ignore the word forms!) to check if other people used them before. I don't mean whole sentences, I mean checking out whether word A is OK to go with word B, or what should be the case of B, etc. I am still doing it when writing in English at times.

6. This all is a lot harder and more time consuming than typing into an online translator. But it'll help you learn and you'll look better in the process.

would you expect to get the same response if you went into an English forum ?
Of course, and I've seen a lot of people making fun of newcomers who spoke bad English on English forums... sometimes quite deservedly... I still remember a certain "big mouse" controversy on rec.games.strategy...