Thread: Russian in College - Suggestions for further self-improvement/retaining over breaks

Originally Posted by Sollos

I have a final tomorrow in my first semester Russian course. I realized that after having not looked at Russian in near about a week, I was drawing blanks all over the place in my memory. Obviously, this will just be getting worse over the Winter and Summer breaks.

Next semester I hear is largely vocabulary based, after learning the grammar this semester (though the instrumentive, genetive, and dative cases still remain). Outside of our textbook and workbook, Troika, I don't have any resources or any habits established outside of the daily assigned homework.

Any recommendations on say, good dictionaries, or fiction books (such as childrens or interlinear)? How about language textbook or workbook supplementals?

Finally, how should I prepare for a vocabulary intensive semester? I started out this year by putting the words we learned into a Spaced-Repetition Memory software, but this quickly became unwieldy. Perhaps I should do handwritten notecards?

Thanks!

Katzner's (big red dictionary) is often suggested, and is extremely useful, along with the Big Book of Russian Verbs (either the 501 or 555). However, I must say that I'm sorry you are using «Тройка», my personaly experience with that book is not good.

Anyway, for outside sources other than books with endless amounts of texts, just try watching childhood movies like Disney, or youtube the russian cartoon «Чебурашка».


Удача!

Originally Posted by Sollos

Finally, how should I prepare for a vocabulary intensive semester? I started out this year by putting the words we learned into a Spaced-Repetition Memory software, but this quickly became unwieldy. Perhaps I should do handwritten notecards?

The only way to enhance your vocabulary intensively is reading, reading and reading, maybe even reading all the day long. This is the most time consuming task. So, find books which you would like to read in English and read it in Russian. There are a lot of books of classic (non Russian) authors which were translated to Russian. For the beginner the non genuine Russian books (books which were originally written in non Russian language, English for an example) would be the best. These books mainly have no weird Russian grammar but have really big vocabulary. You can take books which you've liked to read in English (sci-fi, detectives, horrors or whatever you like) and find a Russian translation.