Thread: Здравсточе! I'm very new, and I was just wondering...

I recently bought the new Penguin's Russian Course... Looks like a good book, very in-depth... And I was wondering: Is there anything else I should have (besides a dictionary) to learn with? And what kinds of difficulties should I encounter? Any tips? Thanks!

-Джэсси

First difficulty is learning how to say hello.

Здравствуйте!

It's hard to anticipate the difficulties you'll encounter when learning Russian. If your native language is english, I think the biggest adjustment will be getting used to the different cases used in Russian (there are 6 of them). Also, and this sort of goes along with the cases, word order does not matter in Russian nearly as much as it does in English. So, if you try to translate things literally, you'll often be confused.

Surprisingly enough, and I think this is a big misconception, is the cyrillic alphabet is the easiest thing about Russian to learn. It only took me a couple of days, and I pretty much had it down. I certainly can't speak for everybody, but I think that is the general consensus among people studying Russian.

Other than that, stick with it! Checking out the "Translate This" or "Only in Russian" forums help me out a lot - even if I don't understand every word being written. With that said, good luck.

tdk

Home-made flashcards and maybe "501 Russian verbs" may be of some use to you...

Если бы только алфавит на самом деле был самой трудной частью русского языка.

Well there's no use relying only on good books, you could study for years and not be able to pronounce very much or understand very much especially if you go to Russia and find people talk faster than you'd expect.

You should hear every word in all it's cases while learning it for the best result.

She's got a good translit of her name, at least!