Thread: Здравствуйте!

Hello, I'm currently learning russian (Self-Teaching through online) and was originally planning on writing this in russian, but I'm still learning phrases and don't want to just write the simple 'Hello my name is Joe' etc. Hoping to stick around here and try to learn some phrases and words from this forum, Пока!

Excellent! Looking forward to answering any questions you have. Russian is a great language to learn. I've been learning it online for a long time so I can point you towards some really good sites to skip the search process:

https://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcq...gPcUW3h2I1BGJg

Grammar tables — LearnRussian

Hey, thanks for the site. Alphadictionary looks promising :P. I was wondering, I've only been learning for about a week and a half now, but I've been enjoying it thoroughly. I've been told that learning phrases is the best thing you can do to begin to understand spoken russian sentences and get a general grasp of understanding russian. Do you have any advice on this, whether it is a good idea to mainly practise phrases at the beginning like I am? It's hard to find any 'order' to what you should learn, and I'm enjoying phrases alot! Cпасибо!

Yeah so, lots of folks come at this from different angles.
Starting with phrases is definitely helpful for starting things up because it means you get to understand the small stuff that is common across all speech like "Thank you" and other phrases that are really likely to come up like "If you could, please...".
That's all good because it introduces you to what it's like to actively listen to some Russian and be able to glean out a tidbit here and there, as well as introducing some really basic phrases to go hard at practicing pronunciation with.
Apart from the benefits of that, as far as laying out a game plan for future learning I can mostly just advocate for the way I did things.
Because I'm so entertained by the grammar, I went all out on it and focused entirely on that to the extent possible (obviously you gotta know some words to apply the grammar to things). I must have known only a few hundred words for a long time because I focused so much on grammar, but I wouldn't say that was a mistake or anything; I probably could've focused on both grammar and vocab if I'd tried.

Obviously learning the alphabet is step one. I'd say pronunciation is a pretty early thing to tackle, mainly because a) the process I'm about to lay out is seemingly unknown to people, b) the existence of this method makes accents inexcusable, and c) it's not too hard all things considered (might take like a month, but that's not long for accents). And the only way to do it right is to learn linguistics. Seriously. Specifically, phonetics. If you only expose yourself to Russian sounds compared to English sounds, you likely won't be able to tell the difference, nor pronounce the difference, as people basically forget the distinctions between sounds that they don't need to distinguish between, when they're a few months old. First as a baby they babble every possible human sound, then they start narrowing in with closer approximations to the mother tongue's inventory of sounds, and lose the ability to hear the difference between sounds that the language groups into one. So, for instance, Russian х and the Arabic guttural sounds seem the same to many English speakers, because the difference has never been necessary, but if you speak Russian with an Arabic sound it will..... Offend the ear, at least.

So what you have to do is look at the Consonant Chart and Vowel Chart here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern...netic_Alphabet

That's, more or less, every possible human sound used in languages around the world. Just fiddle around with them, listening to all the sounds and don't stop until you could pick out each one from a crowd of similar sounds. The vowels are particularly difficult, but it's okay, it is possible to regain the ability to tell. Basically assume, because it's essentially true, that if there are two symbols in the IPA, then somewhere out there in the world there's a language that distinguishes between words using the difference. Anyway, once you've got that down, and learn to hear yourself pronouncing them (learning to pronounce them is both an exercise in hearing, and also in feeling the inside of your mouth), then pronouncing Russian without an accent at all is quite easy. If you find a word in Russian, you can go to its page on wiktionary and the site will give you the pronunciation of the word spelled out in the IPA, which if you can read, means you can read the word without an accent. here's an example page for the word "снегурочка":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%A...87%D0%BA%D0%B0

It's pretty common, at least in my head, to break things up into Vocabulary and Grammar and Pronunciation; another way is Reading, Listening, Writing, Speaking (broadly speaking those are in ascending order of difficulty)

One major thing is to install an add-on to Chrome or Firefox or whatever browser you're using that allows you to double click a word to get its definition/translation (in a void, as in, only the word by itself gets translated; this way the translator is in a sense doing as little work to help you which means your brain is processing all the contextual information which makes it easier to remember what you double-clicked). If you were to put whole sentences into Google Translate, first of all, it's google translate so it'll be awful, second of all, it's hard to see the connections of each word, and third, it's going to mangle the hell out of the meanings of each word so that it can rend it all into a "coherent" whole. So, whole sentences is a no-go, individual words is better. Anyway, then you can pull up an article or a tweet or a book and, depending on your level, interact with it in different ways.

As a beginner, you'd basically just use the text as a field of new words and pick individual words out, without caring at all about what the sentence actually says, because getting to a point where you understand the whole sentence is still a bit down the road. So you'd translate all the words individually, and think of them just as a list of vocab that happens to be arranged into sentences and paragraphs.

After a while of building base vocab, you can begin chugging away trying to squeeze the individual words of a given sentence through your mind until you can start to see the blurry whole that is the sentence's meaning. This can take a lot of processing power, at least as I remember it, so I'd recommend not getting too attached to figuring out any particular sentence, sometimes you just find a complicated one with rare words and complex grammar and it's best to just pick up the words and keep walking.

Thank you for the advice! I've installed a translator for when I double click on the word, I never even knew this app existed, so thanks alot for that :P I'm going to use this to try and read some text online, and see how that works out for me. I'm still quite unconfident on how much vocab I know, so I'll try and stick with this and then begin to learn more Russian grammar once I feel comfortable that I know enough words.