Thread: Tips on expanding vocabulary (particularly, nouns in all forms)

Hello all,

I am looking for some of the methods that worked for you on expanding your vocabulary. When it comes to verbs, I have a really good book that gives me all the forms (with accent marks for correct pronounciation, luckily) and I am progressing very well.

I have studied how to form the various cases(nouns and adjectives), the pronouns, the posessive pronouns, prepositions, etc. In just a few months lots of progress has been made here and I will continue.

I dont just want to learn a bunch of words...i want to learn the words in the different cases AND the correct pronounciation. Forvo pronounciation guide will be useful for this.

Should I just work my way through the MasterRussian top 500 nouns and use forvo to help me learn the pronounciations of the words/cases?

I am hoping, after i get a decent grasp of the language, to actually go to a language school in Russia.

We have a local russian radio station and i am able to pick out lots of words i recognize, so learning to listen will be happening at the same time as learning vocab

I'll talk about pronunciation first:

Wiktionary has pages for 99% of the words you'll come across (reading a news article or something), it has declensions, pronunciations, definitions and the lot all on one page. Even has etymology most times, which can aid in memorizing words' meanings.
[In that 1% you may need to go to викисловарь, Russian Wiktionary itself, to find more new, colloquial, or jargon words.]

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%8...82%D0%B2%D0%BE) here's the page for строительство (notice that it links you right to the dozens of words that are related in meaning and root)

Right under the audio clip of the pronunciation there is the IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet. It's incredibly complicated, contains something like 80+ symbols at least, and is used to write the actual pronunciation of words EXACTLY as the human mouth creates the sounds. You have no reason to learn all of it, probably, but I believe it can be worth it to learn the small section that is used in the Russian language.

More importantly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology ,
This is the ultimate guide to Russian pronunciation. There's no need to read every single sentence, it's brimming with linguistic terms, certainly spread it out over a few days if necessary, but it's all there. I'd mainly recommend the Consonant Chart.

What you see on that page as a bold title, can probably be found as a youtube video that is explained much simpler. For instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO9tqh460OM

Consonants are largely unchanging, but vowels follow what is noun as "vowel reduction". You may have already come across it. It too is a pattern and can be learned, but honestly it's not crucial besides the basics of it; your mind will probably understand it for you, after hearing enough spoken Russian (a lot, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of hours). Russian has enough consonants in its words, that the vowels, particularly when unstressed, can take a laxed backseat. [ə], [ɐ]

Hopefully I haven't missed anything there, or poured too much on you.

In terms of learning the declensions, they are *incredibly* predictable, if you learn the patterns themselves. If you go through the channel of that video above, he has videos describing each case's endings in detail. With some practice and rehearsal, recognizing cases and declining nouns yourself will become FIRST nature, albeit with some time. He also has videos on Vowel Reduction.

It's good that you have that verb book because the conjugation patterns are much more difficult to nail down. (something around 15 different specific groups)

Thank you sir that wictionary is exactly what I needed. I love that channel as well he is the one that made noun declension so much easier for me. And with wictionary, going through the different forms of many different words wilo reinforce what i learned in the videos and the pronunciation guide will help so i dont have to break bad habits as i learn the correct pronounciations.

Vowel reduction and consonant pronounciation is another item of study that i left out that i had a decent grasp of. But theres still nothing like hearing a native speaker to reinforce what you learned. Thanks so much for showing me this resource, time to get to work!!!