I am looking for real Russian friends

Privet :) I am new here. I am looking for real Russian friends ( not fakes ) because I had some bitter experiences for friends in the past :cry: I'm Mina. I am from Japan. I am teaching myself Russian, but I still can't speak Russian, because Russian is very difficult for me to learn. But fortunately I could find this wonderful Russian forum. I will believe that I will be able to master my Russian here :wink:

Well, if you are interested in learning Japanese, I can also help your Japanese, so please always ask me.

Thank you.

Welcome to the forum, Mina.

Mina, привет и тебе!
I know what you mean. At one point I could write and read English, but could not speak or understand spoken word. My advice would be to watch a lot of russian movies over and over. Listen to audio tapes, over and over. And do not hesitate to ask your questions. :)

Fakes??! Do you mean fake internet Russians?!?!? Maybe you encountered Dogboy in one of his "I'm a Russian-Kazakh gangster" phases. :lol:

I don't know Pravit. How is Kabul this time of the year? Look see and do tell!

I like the avatar Mina :)

err not as cool as Lindzi's though (we don't want to have another one of those threads :wink:)

Mina, Japanese is phonetically close to Russian, much closer than English is, when I heard Japanese people spoke Russian they had almost no accent. Russian should not be hard to you. :)

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Originally Posted by waxwing

I like the avatar Mina :)

err not as cool as Lindzi's though (we don't want to have another one of those threads :wink:)

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Yeah, her avatar is cool, but mine is cooler. Credit goes to Josh Kirby for the surly little sketch. :)

(my avatar pwns you, etc etc)

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Originally Posted by JJ

Mina, Japanese is phonetically close to Russian, much closer than English is, when I heard Japanese people spoke Russian they had almost no accent. Russian should not be hard to you. :)

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REALLY?!?!?!? How is this, JJ? I would think all those consonant clusters would pose a bit of a problem to native Japanese speakers.

Maybe it depends on the people, Pravit. Those Japanese people could have been speaking Russian for some time. But I don't know anything about Japanese so I shouldn't say anything...

Of course it depends on the people, but JJ was referring to Japanese in general. Although I only have very limited experience with Japanese, it has a lot of...what do you call it...oh, if only I knew some linguistic terms. Syllables like "ka", "da", "na", and so on, and words made out of them, for example "tabemono", "gohan", "atarashii", and so on. A lot of Japanese speakers(at least the ones I've heard) had problems pronouncing words with more than one consonant together. Considering Russian has some consonant clusters that challenge even English speakers, I can only imagine how (most) Japanese would handle it.

I don't know much about the Japanese language. Aren't Asian languages quite different from Russian? Well, if it is I thnk that is very interesting.

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Originally Posted by Pravit

REALLY?!?!?!? How is this, JJ? I would think all those consonant clusters would pose a bit of a problem to native Japanese speakers.

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REALLY-REALLY! :) The consonants (i mean the hard consonants) and vowels are much closer to the Russian counterparts than to the English. I can discribe the Japanese accsent as ... hm... like they're speaking vowels faster and they're pronounceing consonants are a little bit harder but this pronouncatinon in times more understandable than English is.