1,000 Azeri words and 1 text book in two months | My language mission and my log | Forum

Hi, all.

I'm an American who lives in Russia (accordingly speaks Russian) and is starting to study Azerbaijani.

Using Anki, I'm planning on learning at least 1,000 words and going through a text book (Elementary Azerbaijani) in two months. I figure that afterwards, I should be able to start reading basic texts.

Ideally, I'd like to use a word-frequency list. However, because Azeri is so rarely studied, I haven't found one laying around on the internet. Any advice on what I should do? Should I try to create my own list? Or just base it off of the one that is created through the learning with texts program?

There has got to be at least another person on here studying. Eurovision was in Baku this year).

Thanks for the encouragement and ideas for studying grammar!

All in all, thus far, things are going well. I felt myself getting a little burned out on Anki flashcards earlier this week. So, instead I read these forums for a while and saw Memrise mentioned. I tried using it. It is such a more pleasant experience than Anki. I will be using Memrise for the next 10 chapters. 

Part of the reason for the switch are mnemonics. Being able to save your mnemonic tricks for words is fantastic. And because Azeri words are short, the language lends itself easily to creating mnemonics. When I was studying Russian, this was not the case. Russian words are longer. I had to use a brute force method for many words.  

It's been two weeks. About 200 words are in my short-term memory according to Anki, and there are another 16 words that I have seen/more or less know through Memrise. I've made it through the first two chapters of the book that I'm working on. 

I'm memorizing vocabulary a little slower than I planned. Although my goal was to memorize 1,000 words after 8 weeks, I'm on track to memorize only 800 words. This does not bother me. Maintaining my Russian while also studying Azeri is more time consuming than I thought. Regarding the grammar, I'm also going a little slower. But this is a result of the shear amount of vocabulary in the book. I could quickly master basic grammar because I have already studied Turkish, and I a might just do that and not "master" all the words from each chapter.

So, in general, I'm happy with my progress thus far. I'm thinking that I should try to get some actual practice speaking soon. 

Thanks for the help Loboda and Tuco. Info was helpful. 

It's been a little over two months. I know around 700-800 words (some I already knew from Turkish) and have made through chapter 6 in the text book that I have been working with. Azeri is easy to learn using mnemonic devices because the words are so short. I feel like I have a lot of the most useful words in Azeri and am pleased with the progress that I made. 

I'm going to continue working until I hit 1,000 words. At the same time, I plan to finish going through the book's grammar. I'll update a few more times as time passes. 

I don't think that studying Russian first is that useful if you want to learn Azeri. I ran into some basic shared vocab and know that you can substitute Russian nouns for Azeri nouns when speaking and still be understood (at least in Baku). But that's the extent of the advantage you'd have if you study Russian first.