Learning Russian online

I've noticed a lot of people lately who are trying to learn a language from the net alone. Through my own experiences with trying to learn languages from the net(whether starting from beginning level or trying to find supplements), I've found that there are usually very few serious resources. There might be a phrasebook site or two, or maybe a site with a short intro. There are also sites that seem to hold a good amount of information, but are more of a "grab bag" of language learning resources, rather than a structured course. However, I think that the net holds great potential for people willing to learn. If one were to create a site structured around a good textbook, with interactive exercises and so on, would a person be able to learn the language as well, or better, as if he had bought the textbook and read it by himself? Although I am in no position to teach Russian(or any other language, including my own), I would be interested in creating a site of this sort with the assistance of native speakers and people experienced in teaching the language. What are your opinions on this matter? Does anyone know of any sites like what I am describing, free or otherwise?

Here are some of my criteria for a site like this:

Structured, well-explained lessons
Exercises that show you where you went wrong and how to do it right
A lively discussion forum, much like this one

The above does not sound that hard to implement. If it were possible, however, I would also like to add this:

Listening exercises, sometimes with videos
Conversation practice, either with real people or a program(through text)
More interactive exercise stuff - for example, writing compositions and having a computer grammar checker(or even a real person) go through it for you

There's also another idea I've got up my sleeve that's a great bit different from the standard ones above, but I will have to ruminate on it a bit.

http://masterrussian.net/mforum/viewtopic.php?t=4401
Doesn't seem like anything less than human will work and that could present problems, I reckon.
I would like to see a site with good learning materials though.

Spell checker programs are one thing; programs that analyze sentences and try to understand them are another. As of now, the best programs still make bad grammar errors or can't hold conversations well. There's actually an annual competition for this sort of thing; unfortunately, I have forgotten what it's called. The ALICE program won last year; I was not too impressed, however.

What I would really like to do is write a program that would emulate a person on this forum and see how well it could hold up. :twisted:

As for me, I'm sick of all the "grab bag" type sites. I usually feel lost and I don't really know where to start. An example would be the About.com sites, at least before they switched to their new psuedo-websquatter format. What I would like to see is a site that offers a structured and progressive course in a language.

Pravit, such sites exist already. Take BBC languages site, for example. Others offer their courses for a fee and take you outside the Internet format. What you might not believe, however, is that there are people who simply do not want to take a serious structured course or have a patience to finish one. In general, I like your thinking/idea so PM me if you want to discuss it in more detail.

I was not going to mention it earlier but it seems that for a online Russian programme to work and at the same time be good, there would have to be a fee to cover expenses and that would suck. Unless of course there were enough volunteers fluent in Russian willing to babysit .......then it could be quite good!

There seems to be enough able volunteers at this site to babysit anyone who tries to learn Russian, but of course on the forum you can come and go wherever you want to, whereas if I kept sending people error-riddled essays, it would begin to feel like a job.

About the BBC language sites, I have a vague recollection of their Italian Steps course...let me bring up one of their sites. I'm looking at the German one right now, and it actually does not seem too bad. Pretty good for a casual learner planning on a holiday in Germany. It is good that they explain a little bit how some of the basic phrases work. What I had in mind, however, would be a site for people that want more than tourist-type phrases - a site for people who want to learn the language for the joy of learning languages. Or at least for people who wanted more depth. I have long searched for this kind of site and have come up empty most of the time.

I have noticed most learn-it-yourself books(and many school textbooks) are structured around some kind of dialogue or reading selection, followed by vocabulary used and an analysis of what the people were saying. I do not particularly like this method. What I would like is something that would return the wonder and adventure to language learning. I remember my first textbook; now that I look back on it, I realize it was not very good, from a purely pedagogical point of view. But there was some sort of mystery about it; every new grammar rule they introduced was like some sort of secret or magic spell revealed. Learning Russian, then, was not a matter of systematically memorizing verb conjugations and case declinations; it was more like discovering some new science or magic, and with each turn of the page you could conjure up your own spells or postulate your own theories by putting together these arcane symbols.

Surprisingly enough, I seem to feel a parallel in learning a new programming language. Once they've taught you a bit, you can make your own program. It may be small, and not do very much, but it is your very own, and you can experiment as much as you want to with the small amount of the language you know. As you are presented with more and more, you begin to be able to expand on their ideas, or figure out how to improve your own. In this way, learning a programming language is more like playing and discovering than mind-numbing drudgery. I don't know any programmer who learned his stuff from reading reference manuals; the way to learn to program is to program, play, and experiment. And that is precisely the method I would like to introduce to human language learning.

What I would like is a good repository of audio clips - could be a list of words for a basic vocabulary. Or a simple short story for people to read along as they listen to the audio. It would be great if this was in different formats that were downloadable, to iPod, for instance.

A very early version of what I am trying to think up can be found here.

http://www.freewebs.com/pravit/learnlang.htm

What do you think about it? I'm open to any criticism or suggestions.

Well, it's a good start. At first, I was thrown off a bit by the programmer-ese with a touch of mathematics.

But I sort of see the approach in explaining the case changes. With illustrations, I think that would be even more effective.

I was aware that the "programming" style used might throw off some people(althought it would attract others); I'm rewriting it a bit, but the idea is the same.

боже мой :o

What I really appreciate in a course/textbook is completeness/self-containedness. And though I've heard a lot of trendy language learning theories, I personally prefer to have something grammar-driven to begin with - like you, I think.

Your programming-style approach would require something - a Russian compiler.
MS Word Russian has one which I use from time to time, although I suspect many of the errors it spews out with its little green squiggly lines are spurious (as in English).

Of course the vast majority wouldn't want to do it your way, Pravit. If you ever get into teaching you'll realize how far away you are from the norm :lol:

Yep, I was thinking that it would be rather neat to have a "programming" language with which you could describe a human language. And somehow compile it. I don't know what you would use it for, but this would be one application. :) Well, you wouldn't actually need it for this one, just some kind of sophisticated parser thing that would analyze your sentence...

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completeness/self-containedness

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I appreciate this as well. The problem is where to draw the line on completeness.

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grammar-driven to begin with

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Yep yep, me too. If the book doesn't have grammar, I won't buy it.

Anyhow, I do realize the method up there is rather "weird", and I have no idea how it would actually work. But there are a couple things I wanted to stress:
-treating the language as a tool; all human language is, in effect, a means of getting somebody else to do something, right? ;)
-treating words as references to objects, not the objects themselves
-not giving "translations" of words, but rather, meaning. It's rather hard for me to remember new words, even in English, if they are defined simply by other words.

I rewrote the "programming" thing above to put it in the context of a rather corny fantasy story :), but the idea is exactly the same.

I have other, more conventional ideas for a language-learning site, but the programming one seemed the most interesting at the time.

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If you ever get into teaching you'll realize how far away you are from the norm

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Actually, last semester I had a quite unpleasant experience teaching half-hour-a-week "conversation practicums" for students of German. They were rather dull. I was really motivated at first, but everyone was unmotivated and bored and didn't want to do anything, and the time I was given was really inadequate, so I just ended up making them do dumb activities and fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises. :(

Being a C++ programmer my self, i loved it. However, to most people trying to use that would feel like their trying to learn 2 languages at the same time. If you could move it away from the programming-oriented style to more of a conversational style, that would probably be better for most people. I do however now know what "пачка" means :)

Yay! :) There is indeed a different version I wrote, but I generally dislike fantasy stories and it's so corny that I did not want to post it. But you can take a look here:
http://www.freewebs.com/pravit/firstlesson.htm

About learning two languages, I see what you mean. But what I was trying to do, and as you can see, I intentionally avoided grammar terms(though I don't think it's such a good idea, actually) in order to "trick" people into learning Russian without realizing it. I'll have to think about it some more. All this "declare spell" nonsense is getting on my nerves as a grammar-lover.

Looks good. Will work for programmers for sure but may also work for others if the narration is less technical.

Which one? The first one or the "Harry Potter Learns Russian" one? There are a whole lot of people who aren't programmers, so I was thinking of coming up with somethiing more standard. But the thing is, I want something that reads like a book. I mean, I don't know anyone who curls up in bed with grammar textbooks(well, I have been known to do that occasionally) - I would prefer something that is easy and fun to read. But I'll have to think about how to do it, especially since I'm not that great of a writer in the first place.

One suggestion. At the end of the lesson, you should just quicly summarize what you were talking about in normal speach and direct translations of words and various grammar rules

что - What?
книга - Book
пачка - Bag, pouch (I think?)

-а Base ending for a feminine noun
-у Makes a feminine noun accustive.

As I said earlier, I intentionally wrote the "translations" that way, because I think it is important to learn the meaning and gain a "feel" for words rather than learn "this label is equal to that label." As for using actual grammatical terms, it seems a good idea; no sense making the reader learn two sets of terms. I'm still debating continuing with that approach, it was more of an experiment than aything else.

About "пачка" - maybe I should modify that definition to "a small, often rectangular-shaped container which holds several small objects of the same type." :)

I say this, because if someone was to arrive on a forum such as this and not know how to put a certian word into accustive case because they don't know what "accustive" means. Or maybe have a "gramatical summary for the curious" as a seperate page that has all the rules summarized, just for a reference; not to learn from.

Also, i think it would be a good idea to make word definitions more straight forward.

пачка - A box i.e. He put his shoes in a box.
книга - A book (electronical or physical)

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Originally Posted by Pravit

Which one? The first one or the "Harry Potter Learns Russian" one? There are a whole lot of people who aren't programmers, so I was thinking of coming up with somethiing more standard. But the thing is, I want something that reads like a book. I mean, I don't know anyone who curls up in bed with grammar textbooks(well, I have been known to do that occasionally) - I would prefer something that is easy and fun to read. But I'll have to think about how to do it, especially since I'm not that great of a writer in the first place.

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First one. I didn't see your "Harry Potter" lesson.

Here is another one of my experiments:
http://www.freewebs.com/pravit/akbar.htm

It is not intended to be a stand-alone course, but rather, a supplement to someone learning with some other materials. What do you think?

I thought it was great idea, giving the words little by little. It is always dishearting seeing a full text in russian!

Maybe, when you use the russian word for the first time, you could have the english word above it in small font, so they can make the connection without having to look up the word.

Thanks for your suggestion.

As I wrote in the little note, the entire point of writing it this way was so that it would be easier to guess the meaning of the word(since it is put into context by the English words). Figuring out the meaning of a word by context is the key to reading in Russian, or any foreign language. But I'll take it into consideration, although there is already a similar method to what you mentioned(though written entirely in the target language), that of Ilja Frank. And I have already mentioned I don't believe in learning words just by substituting one label for another.

I like it. I would like to print that page out and show it to a few new Russian students that I know to see what they think. I am certain that it will be well received.

Thanks! What would really be great, though, would be if they were able to figure out the meaning of all the words by guessing. Or at least most of them. I don't know if it would be so easy to teach more difficult words and vocabulary this way, but there's no harm in trying.

I'm thinking that it would be good to give a bit of a primer on grammar terms, such as accusative, dative, pronouns. Especially as if you ask an average high school student, they may not necessarily know what these terms mean. Nor do many grown-ups, especially those with some years between them and the last year they were in high school/college/whichever they consider their final year of formal education.

Oh yeah, I didn't read the little note. I take back my suggestion and burn it.

But, not to purposely waste a whole post, your sun is in the wrong case:

enjoying the warm rays of the солнце

The genitive of солнце is солнца - rays of the sun - лучи солнца(...и согрета лучами звезды по имени Солнце...:) ). I realize it may seem a little weird to put things in the proper case even when they are isolated in the middle of English sentences, but it is a bit of an experiment to see if people can gain a feel for which case needs to be where based on the prepositions in their own language. Besides that, it will be less of a shock when they reach a stage where it is completely written in Russian.

Another suggestion - the style, to keep it interesting, should have a bit of off-the-wall sense of humor. I'm thinking of the textbook that someone referred to in one of the threads, in Book Reviews, I think. It was a college textbook that had stick drawings and took place in an utopia with a twist. I can't remember the name of the textbook, though. I think it was published in the 80s and is still available, if I'm not mistaken. I remember someone posted links to a website that had scans from the textbook.

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Originally Posted by Pravit

The genitive of солнце is солнца - rays of the sun - лучи солнца.

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EXACTLY! So fix the sentence I copied and pasted from your page to солнца :D

Pravit, I like this method and I am familiar with something similar used in the textbook "Russian in 10 Minutes a Day" however they give hints in English. Check it here http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... s&n=507846

Conceptually, you are doing a wonderful thing. But gramatically, I want to note that you have mistakes with declension of nouns and pronouns in your text. For example, in "Akbar stroked свой beard" it should be "свою" because "beard" is a feminine noun. Also, "дерева" should be "деревья" in the context you use this "word referring to a specific object" ;)

I think it is perfect for these students because they have enough knowlege that they are aware of the cases and this will show them a little of how words change while at the same time increase their vocabulary. Unfortunately their classes are not giving them much vocabulary yet and this is a fun way to learn knew words and I also think that they will retain them.

Alas! I must admit that I decided to write things with the proper case about halfway through and did not bother to check the declination of the previous words used, which is why I have the correct своей beard but the incorrect свой beard and солнце earlier on. As for дерева, that was a true mistake; I always screw up that word(and confuse it with the word for "village").

About Russian in 10 minutes a day: I remember a lot of people on the forum talking about it but I never actually looked at this book. If I recall correctly, it has a lot of phrasebook type stuff and big pictures, as well as stickers you could put on things.

DDT: Yes, I hope that something like this could be used alongside a course. I don't think it's enough to learn grammar and vocabulary from on its own.

"village" is "деревня"

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Originally Posted by lolajl

Another suggestion - the style, to keep it interesting, should have a bit of off-the-wall sense of humor. I'm thinking of the textbook that someone referred to in one of the threads, in Book Reviews, I think. It was a college textbook that had stick drawings and took place in an utopia with a twist. I can't remember the name of the textbook, though. I think it was published in the 80s and is still available, if I'm not mistaken. I remember someone posted links to a website that had scans from the textbook.

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I know this site, it has the storys about the "shockworkers"

Oh yeaaahh! That was a cool site; I wish I had had it when I was just beginning. I don't know if I want to go with all the "Soviet" humor, though, or any humor. It is very important to understand humor in the proper context, or a lot of it won't make any sense.

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Originally Posted by Pravit

Oh yeaaahh! That was a cool site; I wish I had had it when I was just beginning. I don't know if I want to go with all the "Soviet" humor, though, or any humor. It is very important to understand humor in the proper context, or a lot of it won't make any sense.

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Point taken. What I meant was to take the idea and rework it in your own way. Maybe impart a bit of cultural lessons along with the grammar info.

Yeah, I'm thinking about it. It does seem a good idea but lately I seem rather humorless for some reason. As for cultural notes, I'm not too sure what that would entail. The story, however, does not take place in Russia, and the characters are not Russian. :D

MasterAdmin, i looked at that book on Amazon and it looks like it can help a lot. Thank you for posting that.


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