Russian or Bust | My language mission and my log | Forum

Hey, Fluentin3months. Long time no see.

The community has exploded since I've been away. I hope the old guys are still around as well, though.

So here's the thing – earlier last year I made it my mission to learn Russian by september 2012. I made a mission thread and everything. It's somewhere at the back of this forum by now. The point is that I didn't do much and what I did do I didn't write down. But all that's changed now. This is a fresh start. I'm going to learn Russian by some point in the future so help me God.

My problem last time was that although I gave myself solid goals (read a Russian article, read a Russian book, learn a Russian song etc.) They were long-term goals over the course of many months. I've since figured out I just don't work that way. If I give myself three months to write three words it'll take me three months. If I give myself three seconds it'll take three seconds. With that in mind I'm going to give myself clear, solid goals in the days ahead to achieve over quite small periods of time. This is Russian or Bust in the truest sense – if I can't keep to this then consider me bust. Speaking Russian for an hour is a big goal that I could easily justify failing to myself. But learning two words and pronouncing them correctly in front of a speaker? That's easy! If I can't manage to do even that then maybe I don't deserve to be on this forum.

This mission started tonight. I've already accomplished my first goal – speak to a Russian native in Russian. Using the wonderful, free service at SharedTalk I managed to find a great guy named Vladimir who wanted to improve his English. Our conversation was bilingual, tending heavily toward the English. He understood everything I said and I understood a lot of what he said in response (though, in fairness, a lot of it was also in English). I feel more confident in talking to strangers in a foreign language after this encounter and I learned a lot.

Specifically I learned that I'm far too easily panicked into flicking into English. I feel slightly strange responding to "hello?" with "здравствуйте" when I'm the Englishman and he's the Russian, for one. I also realise that I get overly concerned with annoying the other person by saying things (in Russian) like "repeat that please", "I don't understand, can you explain?" and the universal "what!?". I need to get it into my head that these people will react to my queries just as I would to them concerning English – in a kind, helpful and generous manner. The types that would get annoyed with me are the types I shouldn't want to talk to anyway.

I'll be recording my daily challenges both here and here on my brand-new blog.

My next daily challenge is to find as many language partners as possible. I'll be looking to facebook friends, SharedTalk folk and elsewhere but also on here. If you can speak Russian and you'd be happy to spend some time chatting to a man whose sole contributions to the conversation will be "что? Я не понимал, что ты сказал. медленнее, пожалуйста" then I'd be forever in your debt. Leave a message in the thread and I'll be in touch.

Also if anyone has any awesome online resources for Russian then I'd love a point in the right direction.

Today's mission to find at least five (5) seperate language exchange sites and talk to once person on each whether voice or chat was slightly frustrated by minor details but overall the endgoal – to put myself into contact with many different circles of Russian speakers, teachers and learners, was a complete success. I've already made friends with at least two people and have spoken briefly with a handful of others. 

What I've learnt from today is firstly that I simply don't know enough words to carry or understand a conversation. I know greetings and can fill out a two-minute conversation of "hello, I'm Alasdair – what's your name?" but on the subject of nearly any topic besides that I'm flitting to-and-from Google Translate to work out what they're saying and how to respond. I understand the grammar so I can tell what's the verb and what tense it's in and who's doing what but I have no idea what any of the words actually mean.

I have also come away from this with raving reviews for SharedTalk, Interpals and MyLanguageExchange which are all excellent, vast tools for finding anyone of any language at any time. I have also come to appreciate more than ever the goodwill of this here community. 

On that subject – I can't see nor can I access the chat function on this site. Is this just me or has it been taken down recently?

I have fewer good words to say about iTalki. Though I will continue to attempt to use it I have been frustrated in my attempts to contact people through iTalki as the site would repeatedly ask me to confirm my email address despite me having already done so many times. It was a tad more confusing than the other three but I also see great potential in the Notebook feature – which is a dedicated Mission Log/Blog thing – and the Answers which is a language-dedicated variant on the Yahoo Answers format. It's all quite self-sustained and I would love to become better acquainted with it.

Tomorrow is a special day in that I'm going in to have a trial day at my local Subway (a fast food sandwich deli for those not in the know) for a job. It's not glamorous and not the kind of thing I'm really into but unfortunately my hometown of Northampton is sorely lacking in student employment. This also means I'll have the middle of my day cut out and by the time I get home it's quite possible most of Russia will have gone to bed. 

But in any case my resolution from today's mission is that I need to know basic vocabulary before I can take my conversing to the next level. I hope to reach a level prior to Sunday that I might, next week, meet with a Ukranian friend of mine and dazzle him with my knowledge. Speaking of which – does anyone know of a faster way of typing in the Cyrillic alphabet than typing it into a convertor and copy-n-pasting the output quickly into the chatbox before my partners get bored waiting? Previously in Hindi basically no-one wrote in the Devanagari Alphabet and stuck to rough Roman approximations. No such love in Russian – I need to write in Cyrillic fast and it's going to take a while to learn the actual keyboard layout (especially without the letters on the keys).

Tomorrow's mission is to Learn the first 50 verbs of Russian (as categorised by frequency) and input them into  an Anki deck. Actually learning these verbs is going to take a while but as someone once said on this site it's often a case of quantity – if you retain a tenth of what you read then learning 100 garners you 10 verbs memorised forever. I'll start small tomorrow, though, as I'm elsewise busy.

Hey guys and gals

I've had an awful cold for the last three-four days so not only have I not been updating this place I've also not had much to update it with. This is a short update to let you know that I'm still around and yes I realise this and the last post are both excuses. Connected excuses, I might add, since coming back to the student hoards of Kent often provokes a brief head-cold in me at the start of every term.

I'll be reading a single chapter of my Russian book tomorrow and writing a script to a video tour of my tiny room in Russian on my tiny phone. Should be really professional. That was sarcasm.

Having the cold meant I missed my Russian lesson and so had to compose (well, chose to compose) an email to my tutor in Russian explaining my illness. Whilst I haven't remembered any new vocab from this it was practice all the same.

Having the cold also meant I was reminded of the first time I had a cold in University and how I had to explain both to the Ukranian girl at the Russian vendor and my teacher that I had a really bad throat (Plokhaya Gorla) and so couldn't talk much (vital in my Russian lessons where Olga insists on constant class speaking exercises). I had to learn the word "throat" and though it's never come up until now I remembered it instantly because the reason I learnt it and remembered it was personal to me and not some random word I had tried to cram into my head. 

The lesson I take from this is that we, all of us as language-learners, need to talk in our languages not just because we need to practice speaking and listening but because it puts us in sitautions where we have to learn vocab for personal reasons and that's the sort of vocab that never goes away.

Stay tuned for my video which I will film on Sunday and upload Sunday/Monday depending on file size. 

большое спасибо всем! I've not been doing much these days on account of revision. However I am planning to in the coming week go to an Eastern European Shop which I'm told is in town in order to buy a Russian newspaper or газета. I have also been listening to my favourite Russian songs as it was Russian singing (particularly the popular national songs and the Second World War soldier songs) that made me fall in love with this wonderful language. 

My favourite song remains Podmoskovnye Vechera - Подмосковные Вечера