Quote Originally Posted by kukushka
Btw @ycomp, can you tell us about your method for increasing vocabulary? I'm in sort of a reverse situation - I have decent grammar and understanding of language structure but need to improve my vocab.

Cant find a book to help me with that. I have been making index cards by going through the list of most frequently used words at http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/ssharoff...rqlist-en.html and picking the unfamiliar ones. Do you have any recommendations?
well I know many many thousands of words, that's for sure... from having been exposed to it a bit (but never speaking) as a kid and from spending time in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine... not studying, just speaking. But I still do lack an understanding of some very common words (mostly verbs and adjectives). This program I will describe below is starting to help, now I am recognizing more words in Russian songs and such - that I have just learned from the program.

I did try previously many different programs but never actually did much more than try them. Rosetta stone, which I thought is terrible... too slow. So never got anywhere with that, just basically checked it out. I did find a great program for vocab called Declan's Russian flashcards... lots of words there. The I discovered they have an iPhone app too. iPhone app is not as good as the windows version for me, since I have to spend a lot of time flagging each word so that they will quiz me on all 50 words in each file. If I don't do that then what happens is it will want me to complete all 4 exercises on 10 words, before moving on to the next 10 words and well, the only exercise that interests me is the one where they pronounce the words in Russian and then give you a choice of English words to choose from. The spelling exercise especially is just way too slow. So while this is a great program, it requires too much work from me to use it.

What I was referring to in my post was another iPhone program for Russian by a Russian guy who wanted to learn Japanese originally. www.russianapp.com . This program is genius (just make sure you get the one that has 5000 words where they actually PRONOUNCE the words). The reason it is genius is, for me at least, that it seems to almost work the same way gambling does. I am no compulsive gambler, but I have gambled once or twice. And I did notice the parallels in winning and losing streaks between gambling and this program.

The program will say a Russian word and you touch somewhere to see the English word and hit "right" or "wrong" if you had guessed it correctly. This is the hands-down fastest way I have ever seen to work through vocab. The real genius is how it keeps you playing. It will test you on the words you do not answer correctly of course, but also less frequently on recent words you answered correctly and also even less frequently on older words you guessed correctly.

In practice what this does is eventually you will accumulate about 10 words you really just don't know... which is frustrating and you are almost ready to stop... but you keep working through and when you get one of those correct... often you will hit many in a row that you guess correctly. This relieves the frustration and keeps you "in the game". Therefore I will use it longer than I would have otherwise. And I seem to retain the words fairly well.

It is similar to gambling in that you have a big losing streak, you want to give up... then you hit a winning streak and you keep on playing I find it very effective for learning vocab. Some people who review the software complain that it is not just simple words they would use when visiting Russia... but I do not actually want those words. There are many places to learn the basic words, if you do not know them already... which you probably do.

btw. thanks for that link to that book, it looks great.