Hello everyone,

I'm studying Russian on my own, using Russian, from 1983 by Ben T. Clark. It's very slow going and I have a lot of questions. I'm afraid I'll have little to contribute to the forum, for now at least, except questions; but maybe my questions will help someone else too, who knows?

I have no good reason to torture myself with Russian. I'm nearly 50 years old and have no Russian blood. My daughter was doing a school project on alphabets of the world and we both somehow found the Russian alphabet fascinating. She learned it right away by heart and I just couldn't until I found a Russian Sesame Street video on YouTube. I got some tapes to try to learn the phonetics, then found this grammar book and started working through it at the end of December. My wife says if I can learn to speak Russian before our 25th wedding anniversary, we can go to St. Petersburg instead of our planned trip up the Rhine (she's from Strasbourg). Our anniversary is in two years so the race is on.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out.

Z