Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
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.
I really like this post, Mr McGee and I'd like to add a few things if you don't mind:

Everyone is different, so this may or may not work for you, but if you have five hours a day to study, then definitely get some clips of some movie or video in Russian that is at least semi interesting to you. Get the text for it too. Pull out some words every day, write them down, by hand, and memorize them. Take 5-10 words a day. Then listen to the video and pick out the words. Keep doing this until you've learned a bunch of new words and can semi understand the conversation. You should read it aloud too. To do this you will have to learn some grammar (see advice above about this).

Then get yourself into a situation where you can use Russian. Go to Russian store weekly and prepare what you want to say, ie Can you show me where the herring is? Or perhaps there is a Russian speaking person around you who is interesting, make conversation with them, you can prepare a little in advance too.

One older guy many years ago explained to me that to learn a language, you need to engage all 5 senses (the writing part is for visual) so you can use this approach to supplement whatever else you're planning to do.