Thread: Quickest possible way to star speaking russian?

Originally Posted by impulse

To tell the truth you cannot learn russian at a high level in a couple of months. You can only learn some basic grammar rules in this time scale. To learn it at a high level you need 10 or more years I guess. So keep your hopes at a low level to avoid disappointment.

10 years seems ridiculous! Nothing is that complicated. I'm pretty sure anyone can speak russian in 1 year if they immerse themselves in it daily?

Originally Posted by Venom

10 years seems ridiculous! Nothing is that complicated. I'm pretty sure anyone can speak russian in 1 year if they immerse themselves in it daily?

Anyone can learn how to say the Russian equivalents of "My name is X -- what's your name?" and "Can you tell me where the bathroom is?" and "How much for a kilogram of tomatoes?" in FAR LESS than one year.

This is not the same thing as "speaking" a language, however!

(If you look on YouTube for so-called "polyglots" who claim that they can speak nine languages, in most cases they merely know a dozen or so phrases in each of the nine languages. Some of them are truly bilingual or even trilingual -- with native fluency in two or three languages -- but for the rest of the "nine languages" they claim to speak, they've only memorized basic phrases and sentences similar to the examples I gave above.)

P.S. I got straight A's in four years of college-level Russian. Then I went to Moscow to teach English, and five minutes after getting off the plane at Sheremetevo airport, I realized the horrifying truth: I could barely understand what anyone was saying!!!

And ten minutes after that, I had a revelation: the single most important slogan for me to use, at least for my first couple of months living in Russia, would be: По-медленнее, по-проще, по-короче, пожалуйста -- я не русский! (A bit more slowly, simply, and briefly, please! I'm not a Russian!)

P.S. My story is not meant to suggest that the Russian program at the University of Virginia had low standards, or that I was a lazy student. (My ability to speak and understand spoken Russian improved significantly after living a few months in Moscow, in part because I had a very solid base of grammar and vocabulary from my college courses.) The point is that real people in real life do not speak like the "practice dialogues" in textbooks -- and real life does not have subtitles, either.

P.P.S. Even if you're not taking Russian through a formal course at a school, I would recommend that you acquire a college-level first-year Russian grammar textbook (I'm sure you can get a used one very cheaply online), and that you take the time to work your way through ALL of the practice translations and sentence drills ("Иван видит красивую девушку. Она сидит за столом."), no matter how boring they seem. A good college textbook will provide you with A LOGICAL STRUCTURE to help you better organize and make sense of all the "fun" Russian that can learn from songs and movies online.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

...P.P.S. Even if you're not taking Russian through a formal course at a school, I would recommend that you acquire a college-level first-year Russian grammar textbook (I'm sure you can get a used one very cheaply online), and that you take the time to work your way through ALL of the practice translations and sentence drills ("Иван видит красивую девушку. Она сидит за столом."), no matter how boring they seem. A good college textbook will provide you with A LOGICAL STRUCTURE to help you better organize and make sense of all the "fun" Russian that can learn from songs and movies online.

This one is well recommended: A Comprehensive Russian Grammar by Terence Wade

Originally Posted by Lampada

This one is well recommended: A Comprehensive Russian Grammar by Terence Wade

http://worldtracker.org/media/librar...%20Grammar.pdf

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Anyone can learn how to say the Russian equivalents of "My name is X -- what's your name?" and "Can you tell me where the bathroom is?" and "How much for a kilogram of tomatoes?" in FAR LESS than one year.

This is not the same thing as "speaking" a language, however!

(If you look on YouTube for so-called "polyglots" who claim that they can speak nine languages, in most cases they merely know a dozen or so phrases in each of the nine languages. Some of them are truly bilingual or even trilingual -- with native fluency in two or three languages -- but for the rest of the "nine languages" they claim to speak, they've only memorized basic phrases and sentences similar to the examples I gave above.)

P.S. I got straight A's in four years of college-level Russian. Then I went to Moscow to teach English, and five minutes after getting off the plane at Sheremetevo airport, I realized the horrifying truth: I could barely understand what anyone was saying!!!

And ten minutes after that, I had a revelation: the single most important slogan for me to use, at least for my first couple of months living in Russia, would be: По-медленнее, по-проще, по-короче, пожалуйста -- я не русский! (A bit more slowly, simply, and briefly, please! I'm not a Russian!)

P.S. My story is not meant to suggest that the Russian program at the University of Virginia had low standards, or that I was a lazy student. (My ability to speak and understand spoken Russian improved significantly after living a few months in Moscow, in part because I had a very solid base of grammar and vocabulary from my college courses.) The point is that real people in real life do not speak like the "practice dialogues" in textbooks -- and real life does not have subtitles, either.

P.P.S. Even if you're not taking Russian through a formal course at a school, I would recommend that you acquire a college-level first-year Russian grammar textbook (I'm sure you can get a used one very cheaply online), and that you take the time to work your way through ALL of the practice translations and sentence drills ("Иван видит красивую девушку. Она сидит за столом."), no matter how boring they seem. A good college textbook will provide you with A LOGICAL STRUCTURE to help you better organize and make sense of all the "fun" Russian that can learn from songs and movies online.

Wow that's really interesting. Do you think it'd help to speak to a russian native on Skype regularly? (I definitely need to teach myself a lot more before I can do this)

The problem with me is that I'm a perfectionist. If I start learning grammar I'll get obsessed with it and waste time trying to learn every little detail! Haha. I just want to be in a position where I can have regular conversations with russian speakers at my university.

I purchased the Blackwell grammar book, hopefully that'll help! I'm also reading "A complete russian course for beginners by Nicholas Brown".

I'm talking to a russian friend over Facebook daily who is teaching me common russian phrases all the time

I know it comes across as immature to want to learn Russian as fast as possible, but I just want to be very efficient with my learning seeing as I have 5+ hours per day. I also want to visit Russia sometime this year!


PS- would you recommend any other specific college textbook?

Originally Posted by Venom

The problem with me is that I'm a perfectionist. If I start learning grammar I'll get obsessed with it and waste time trying to learn every little detail!

The problem with being "obsessed" with grammar is not that it's a waste of time learning the details, but that you become so afraid of making a grammar mistake that you're shy about speaking and writing Russian. But look at it this way: If an ESL speaker says "I'm going at supermarket" -- instead of "to the supermarket" -- absolutely every native speaker of English will understand the meaning, in spite of the mistakes. (And English speakers who've studied other languages will be very sympathetic, because they know from experience that little words like prepositions can be notoriously difficult.)

Still, you obviously need SOME grammar, such as the rules for forming the tenses of regular verbs. (You'll still screw up the irregular verbs, but guess what -- young Russian kids do that, too, just like English-speaking children say "writed" and "buyed", but adults will generally know what the kids are trying to say.) So, in the beginning, there's no getting around a certain amount of rote memorization and recitation of past and present verbs, or the six case endings of "type 2" feminine nouns, or the conjugations of easily confusable verbs like "lie" and "lay" or "sit" and "set" (which, alas, are just as much of a headache in Russian as in English, if not worse!).

The good news, on the other hand, is that once you've absorbed some of the basic patterns, you'll no longer have to worry about rote-memorizing 12 different forms (i.e., six cases, singular and plural) for every new noun you learn. You'll just go, "aha, this noun is masculine and it behaves like the masculine nouns I've already learned."

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

The problem with being "obsessed" with grammar is not that it's a waste of time learning the details, but that you become so afraid of making a grammar mistake that you're shy about speaking and writing Russian.

One motto I recommend: Never be embarrassed because you sound just like a Russian version of Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein...

https://screen.yahoo.com/seasons-gre...000000685.html

"Bread gooooooood! Fire baaaaaaad!"

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Anyone can learn how to say the Russian equivalents of .... "Can you tell me where the bathroom is?" ... in FAR LESS than one year.

Knowing how to say it in the native language of the country one visits may prove useful. A policeman near a concert stage in the middle of Champs de Mars for an open-air jazz band gig may even offer one to use the facilities under the stage, if a hapless tourist is bold enough to address the question in a quickly and awkwardly made up French phrase.