Thread: Hello!

Hello everyone! My name's Richard, I'm a college student from South Dakota USA, and I'm studying Russian because....well, because I thought it would be a fun thing to do I only just started a week ago, so I have pretty much no working vocabulary yet but I'm loving it so far.

Any advice is more than welcome, of course. This is really the first foreign language I'm trying to learn, and I don't have a teacher or know anyone who speaks Russian, so any tips or tricks that can help me get a better knowledge of the language are appreciated!

Hi! I recommend learning Cyrillic first... very useful. Also, just learning basics (hello, goodbye, please, thank you etc), then building on the basics. I've found most Russians to be incredibly helpful to foreigners learning the language, so just dive in, and enjoy it

Try to think in Russian. Imagine it like a switcher in your brain, when english words stop coming to your mind when you are trying to say something in Russian. This will be also helpful when you come across this feature of the language that the tenses shift forward in sentences like this:

"He told me that I had (the past) to learn Russian first" -> Он сказал мне, что сначала я должен (the present) выучить русский.

This kind of imaginary travelling into the past, to the moment of saying, is quite applicable as regards the reported speech and it needs some kind of the brain-switching skill.