Quote Originally Posted by Venom View Post
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.