I need some inspiration

Before I started studying Russian, I read some Finnish. I found out the words were very easy to both read/pronounce and remember. I think I could learn Finnish pretty good even though it's in a different family than my native language.

The reason I stopped reading Finnish was that it's pretty useless (only 6 millinon speakers in the world or something). Russian seems a lot more widespread, with over 300 million speakers. Is this right? Will I get a lot more out of learning Russian than Finnish?

The problem, however, is that I found out Russian is very difficult :? . I have learned some words and I can pronounce most words written in the cyrillic alphabet, also write, but it's going VERY SLOW. One sentence can take up to 5 minutes to read! The words are so different also, I find them very hard to remember. I feel having to work with this freaky alphabet makes the whole learning progress slower. Before getting to memorise a word, I first have to "translate" it into my own alphabet so I can understand what it sounds like.

What to do? Is it unrealistic to learn Russian without going to classes? How can I learn words easier, read faster and get to learn the alphabet easier? Right now, when I see a long text in Russian, I only see a soup of weird symbols, I really have to concentrate and read a word letter by letter, and it's just going so slow.

I hope someone can give me some advice to learn easier! Thanks.

We all have the same problems when we start the learning of the new language, Odjur.
Keep your nose in the air and do not be disappointed so soon. Slowly but surely you will learn the alphabet and then things will go easier.

You have to learn the alphabet - it's the only and the most simple way to study any language.

The Russian pronunciation is much more clear for understanding and more logical than English pronunciation. Besides many Russian letters are the same with the English letters like A E O T M K.

Would you recommend start writing with Russian letters in my own language just to learn the alphabet easier? It should be easier to read and learn Russian words after that, right?

wait, I didn't catch your thought in the first time. Well, I never tried this way. At the first time I usually wrote the English words in my native (Russian) language to learn how they sound.

Thanks, I will try to do that for a while now and see if reading Russian gets easier after that.

Russisk er enkelt, min kj

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Originally Posted by kalinka_vinnie

форумцы - не обижаете норвежца! А то варяги придут к вам в гости... :wink:

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Один раз уже пришли. :)

А кто обижает?

И во мне течёт капля варяжской крови.

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апельсиновый сок

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Odjur wrote:
Would you recommend start writing with Russian letters in my own language just to learn the alphabet easier? It should be easier to read and learn Russian words after that, right?

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I wouldn't recommend that. Press on the memorizing the cyrillic letters.
It may be difficult at first but then you'll get used to it. Nothing will help except practice. Just excersize reading and it will come to you. Transliterating will get you a horrible accent which would be difficult to get rid from, because you'll be unconsciously applying the rules of English pronounciation and it will also make it hard to read the cyrillic.
I think you'd need about a month to fix the Russian alphabet in your memory and after that your learning will go more smoothly.
Don't make your life easier now, because it will be more difficult later to adjust your perception.

апельсиновый сок - apel'sinovyj sok - orange juice

Try use site http://www.translit.ru

Туре уоur sentence in the edit window and press "в латиницу" button.

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orange juice

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Appelsin. Kalinka написал по-норвежски...

Just a word of encouragement from a low level learner. I travelled to Ukraine twice before I started any serious study of Russian. The first time I went I thought I would learn a little from a tiny textbook we brought along. I looked at it but found it too confusing and put it away. When I went back the next year my goal was to know the alphabet well enough that if I saw a word that was pretty much the same as English (like ресторан) I would be able to recognize it. So it took me probably 18 months to learn the alphabet :)

Things got much better once I got that alphabet down. It is still difficult, especially as I'm not in a class and don't have much chance to practice speaking and listening. Like with anything else, the best way to learn it is a little each day. Generally more than one hour of study at a time will not help you much.

Odjur, why don't you go the best Russian class in the world, where the teachers are friendly, helpful, fast to respond, and simply out of this world. I'm referring to wonderful teachers like Оля, Лев, Rtyom, gRomozeka and many many others in this forum.
The classroom is here ------->

http://masterrussian.net/mforum/viewtopic.php?t=7346

Go to the first few threads and download the necessary lessons and start from there. I've learnt a lot here, but as I am a very slow learner, I'm still at the beginner stage, but I know I'm progressing. Hope to get some real life practice soon.