Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
I will do some exercises for this, until I get it right.
You are probably wondering "how can she speak with people if she does not know this?"
Well, since I don't know it, I have to speak "pidgin" style with incorrect grammar.
But my "conversations" are quite simple most of the time.

I had been hoping that I'd be better at Russian for this trip but unfortunately the winter ended up being a super busy time for me and I did not have the time or energy to study.

My dream of speaking fluent Russian is VERY far away and I am not sure how realistic it actually is. There is not the same driving force of necessity that spurred me on with English. It won't destroy my career prospects or anything like that if I can't speak Russian... but I WANT to!
Hanna, I was really glad to hear you say all this.

I have the same problem with nouns and the declensions of cases.. I've been studying Russian three years, and everytime I think I've got cases understood, I stumble across an exception and feel I have to start out back at Square 1 to understand things right.

It reminds me of when I was 12 years old, trying to learn QBASIC through trial and error *(there was no "internet" to ask, hehe)* .....

Please don't let frustration bother you in this. And don't give up. We may learn best (and more comfortably) through rote memorization, through committing these patterns to memory. But when that fails (as it often has me), a different kind of learning can pick up in its place. ... Have you seen a movie called Memento? Its theme is amnesia and it mentions a lot about this second sort of learning - I think about it a lot when I consider my rocky road in learning Russian. =)