Thread: Greetings from Wyoming!

Hello, my name is Joshua. I have been fascinated by Russia ever since I was a kid. I always found it strange that my history teachers would just skip over Russian history, this lead me to learn more about it on my own. The more I learned about Russian history and culture the more I wanted to know more. Now that I’m older and have the discipline to do so, I want to learn the Russian language. I have never been good at learning any language, and I know that Russian is a hard language to learn. So I know that this is going to be difficult for me to learn but I’m no stranger to hard work. Hopefully I will learn more here than I have been able to learn on my own.

Здравствуйте! меня зовут Джейден. Очень приятно.
That means "Hello! My name is Jaden. Pleasure to meet you."

I'm all over spaceflight so I got all over Russia and now I have an epic interest in anything Russian. And trust me, if I can learn Russian then anyone can, lol. Have you seen the movie, Россия? It's amazing!
Have you learned the Cyrillic alphabet yet? That's the first step to learning Russian. I'll leave a copy in my post. But don't attempt to learn the Russian script till later cause it gets really confusing sometimes. Btw, Russian isn't as difficult as I thought it would be. If you really wanna learn it, you will, and the members here will help you with any mistakes in your posts.
Anyway, here's the movie and the alphabet. See you in the threads!

Welcome aboard, mate!

@UhOhXplode
I already have a decent understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet. I actually found the Cyrillic alphabet fairly easy to remember because of its similarities to the Latin alphabet and the Greek alphabet. I’ll watch the video and hopefully post more on the forums later when I’m not so busy with my University course work.
@Medved
Thank you for the welcome.

Originally Posted by Specter

@UhOhXplode
I already have a decent understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet. I actually found the Cyrillic alphabet fairly easy to remember because of its similarities to the Latin alphabet and the Greek alphabet. I’ll watch the video and hopefully post more on the forums later when I’m not so busy with my University course work.
@Medved
Thank you for the welcome.

Cool! For me, learning the Cyrillic alphabet was the most difficult part. And yeah, I know all about the school stuff. That's why I waited till summer to learn the alphabet. The movie's all about nature and wildlife in Russia and it's definitely worth it. You can learn a ton of stuff about Russian culture in the forum.
Удачи. (Good luck)

Specter: If you're attending a university, you might be able to buy a used 1st-year Russian grammar textbook quite cheaply, even if you're not formally enrolled in a Russian course. And I highly recommend acquiring a 1st-year college text on Russian -- usually they're better organized than any of the "Russian for Dummies" titles that you might find in a regular bookstore.

Also, if you haven't really studied other foreign languages in any depth, I recommend that you carefully read this Wikipedia article on Latin grammar -- it may help you better understand threads about Russian grammar on this forum. (Not that Latin and Russian are particularly similar to each other -- it's just that they're both "highly inflected Indo-European languages," whereas English is also Indo-European, but only slightly inflected. If you already have a thorough understanding of what "inflection" means, then you can probably skip that Wikipedia article... but if you're not sure what it means when I say that "Russian and Latin are more inflected than English," then it's extremely important to digest the fact that Russian (and Latin) use endings/suffixes rather than word-order or auxiliary verbs to express the difference between, for example "The girl loves the farmer" and "The girl might have loved the farmer."

So, don't try to memorize the article about Latin grammar (since the exact rules are different in Russian), but do skim through it several times and try to get the general concepts (because in some ways Russian is more like Latin than English).

@UhOhXplode
The Cyrillic alphabet is much easier to learn if you have both the Latin and Greek alphabets memorized. I look forward to reading the forum more when I have the time.
@Throbert McGee
I have already worked out a deal with the university book store to get the books that are used in the Russian courses. I have noticed that Russian uses inflection and that the word order is more flexible than English which shouldn’t be that much of an issue for me so long as I can learn the rules of it.

@Specter.
Thanks for the heads up on the Latin and Greek thing but I already memorized the Cyrillic alphabet. I know it as well as I know the English alphabet now, I write stuff in Russian script (л м и ш get scary sometimes, lol), and I memorized all the keys so I can type Russian on an English keyboard (the green letters on my diagram).
One thing you may see is that the script letters for "И", "Й", and "Л" are sometimes used in plain text so "И" and "Й" look like "U" and "Л" looks like an upside-down "V".
Btw, two good online Russian courses are the MasterRussian course and the LearnRussian.RT.com course. The RT course stresses listening to Russian conversations and translating what you hear. I started that one a few days ago and I'm already at Lesson 3 Task 11. It really owns to hear Russians speaking and know what they're saying!

@UhOhXplode
When I say Latin alphabet I generally mean Latin-derived alphabet. English uses a Latin-derived alphabet as such it does have some common characters with the Cyrillic script. As for the Greek alphabet characters like: “П”, “Д”, “Р”, “Х”, “Г”, “Л”, and “Ф” are similar to Greek characters. Knowing these Greek characters did make remembering Cyrillic a bit easier but isn’t necessary. I always thought that the plain text version of Л looked more like “Λ”, the capital version of Lambda from Greek, but that is only because Greek characters as used heavily in engineering, math, and science. I have been looking over the MasterRussian courses between classes. I had no idea that RT offered Russian lessons hearing and trying to understand spoken Russian will be most helpful.

Wyoming is one of the most fascinating US states for sure. I'd love to visit there. Nice that you found the forum, and Welcome!

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

I write stuff in Russian script (л м и ш get scary sometimes, lol), and I memorized all the keys so I can type Russian on an English keyboard (the green letters on my diagram).

When I took Russian waaay back in college, they made us write in cursive Cyrillic all the time, and this is absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if you rarely use cursive longhead when writing in English. I just wish I had learned Cyrillic touch-typing at the same early stage! I totally recommend getting in some practice with both cursive and touch-typing early in your Russian studies.

P.S. Just for fun, did you know that the Я actually started out as a ligature of Iota + Alpha, to represent the vowel combination "ia"? One of the historical intermediate forms looked kind of like a very, very "manly" letter A, if you get my drift, with the Iota hanging down between the two legs of the Alpha:
Ѧ

That's how it would've been chiseled into wood or stone. But with brush and ink, it was written like this:



If you squint at it, you can see how that was later standardized into the modern Я form. And there a few other letters in the modern alphabet (Ы, Ю, and maybe Ж) that originated as two older letters combined in a ligature -- just in case you were wondering how they came up with these forms. Throw in a couple Hebrew letters -- namely ש (shin) and צ (tsadi), which were respectively borrowed and modified to create Ш, Щ, Ц, Ч -- and you've got the whole Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

@Hanna
It always surprises me when people say that they have heard of Wyoming. It just seems that most people, even other Americans, have never even heard of this state. If you ever do visit be sure to go to Yellowstone as it is probably the most noteworthy thing in the state. And thank you for the welcome.
@Throbert McGee
I agree that mastering cursive Cyrillic and touch-typing on a Cyrillic is an important step in learning the Russian language. It is interesting to see how much languages have changed over the years and just how much they borrow and adapt form other languages.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

When I took Russian waaay back in college, they made us write in cursive Cyrillic all the time, and this is absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if you rarely use cursive longhead when writing in English. I just wish I had learned Cyrillic touch-typing at the same early stage! I totally recommend getting in some practice with both cursive and touch-typing early in your Russian studies.

P.S. Just for fun, did you know that the Я actually started out as a ligature of Iota + Alpha, to represent the vowel combination "ia"? One of the historical intermediate forms looked kind of like a very, very "manly" letter A, if you get my drift, with the Iota hanging down between the two legs of the Alpha:
Ѧ

That's how it would've been chiseled into wood or stone. But with brush and ink, it was written like this:



If you squint at it, you can see how that was later standardized into the modern Я form. And there a few other letters in the modern alphabet (Ы, Ю, and maybe Ж) that originated as two older letters combined in a ligature -- just in case you were wondering how they came up with these forms. Throw in a couple Hebrew letters -- namely ש (shin) and צ (tsadi), which were respectively borrowed and modified to create Ш, Щ, Ц, Ч -- and you've got the whole Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

LOL about the "manly" letter A! But yeah, that really adds up now so thanks for the heads up about that!
I do a lot of cursive handwriting in Russian and it's getting easier. It gets kinda confusing sometimes when "И", "Ш", and "Л" are together but that will probably be easier to deal with as my vocabulary expands. I got side-tracked by Russian culture and history but now I'm back to learning the language, yay! And my Russian vocabulary (of memorized words and dialogue) is expanding really fast!

@ Specter.
Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of Greek/Latin symbols in maths at school and I'll probably see tons more when I get enrolled at a university. It's really interesting stuff!