Hi to everyone,
I am from Hungary. The language is not Slavic, thus has not much in common with Russian. However, I learned Russian in school for seven years years ago...but since I did not use it anywhere outside school, I have forgotten a lot and regard myself a beginner. (I can recall a lot of words, though.)
I am a chess-player and collector of chess-books, which I would eventually like to be able to read by myself, and also to communicate with native speakers I meet at competitions in their language. When I learned English, I used to have penpals, which helped me an awful lot, so developing writing skills could be another aim later on.
I love the sound of the language, I always listen to Russian music of radio stations, and all the library staff here know by now that I leave again and again borrowing at least a big Russko-Vengersky dictionary. Speaking of libraries, of course there is plenty of literature on learning Russian in libraries here, for the understanding of which I would not even need to understand an intermediate language, still I think it is not a bad idea to practice two languages during the process.
I already have plenty of books and language-teaching applications in English but have not yet consulted anyone about them. So as my first step here, if you don't mind, I would like to share some of the titles with you, and ask about which one to study... In which thread can I do that?
My name in real life is Zoli, a common male first name, but here I prefer something else, the translation of which I use in relation to chess,
Snezhnaya Baba