Speak a little Russian back to people (and work on the rest) | My language mission and my log | Forum

While I absolutely need to work on keeping up my Hebrew and French, and improving my German (and maybe Irish), I also feel the need to learn Russian. Twice in the last two weeks I've had people come over to me in public and try to speak it to me, and each time I've had to just shake my head. Apparently I look like I could be Russian? One of the names on my ID card is most commonly found among Russian speakers too, so I've had people phone and want to speak Russian to me as well.

So, the mission is that from now on when this happens I will actually respond in Russian, and that by the summer this will mean actually saying something useful to the other person! (Usually when being approached on the street it's because the person wants directions or some other assistance.)

I'm working with a book of DH's: The New Penguin Russian Course: A complete course for beginners and it's actually frustrating me so far, since the first two chapters are entirely on the alphabet and handwriting and only use the language for reading practice. The book is from 1996 and that definitely shows since among the words we're supposed to recognise are things like glasnost and perestroika. I'm interspersing that with some online stuff for pronunciation.

Interesting. I have actually gone through some of LiveMocha's beginners' Hebrew course (largely for the writing feedback, which I didn't realise I could get on Lang-8, although some of the vocab was stuff I'd missed in my eclectic path too) and thought that it'd be entirely confusing for a real beginner, but that may be partially an issue of Hebrew grammar. I could certainly give it a go – thanks! (It'll be a good test of how I'm doing with the Cyrillic, at least.)

kaet said:

I'm working with a book of DH's: The New Penguin Russian Course: A complete course for beginners

That, in my opinion, is definitely the best Russian book I cam across so far! I'm on lesson 24, and I love how it explains grammar well and in a simple way. Its only con is that it has few exercises.

fabriciocarraro said:

kaet said:

I'm working with a book of DH's: The New Penguin Russian Course: A complete course for beginners

That, in my opinion, is definitely the best Russian book I cam across so far! I'm on lesson 24, and I love how it explains grammar well and in a simple way. Its only con is that it has few exercises.

Thank you. For some reason I didn't see this post last night, but I appreciate it. I'm still only on lesson 3 (I've been doing some stuff online for the pronunciation – no matter how good a book is, audio is definitely better for that!) so I'm only getting to the initial grammar now.

I think I'm spending far too much time learning Russian vocab (physical flashcards of the book words and Memrise) at the cost of doing anything else. On the one hand I am trying to work out the grammar I'm coming across on Memrise, but on the other, I'm really not trying to use the language in any natural fashion. Basically I'm not getting out of the house enough and thus not even speaking Hebrew more than about twice a week, and no Russian or French (let alone German) at all. I'm reading a bit in French, German and Hebrew, but this really isn't enough.

I'm rather lackadaisically trying to work out how to find someone to set up conversation sessions with in Russian & English locally. I need to get on with that!

Unfortunately our Skype access is patchy at best (ill laptop + slow broadband) so I stick to using it with my parents, mostly, who I can 'hang up on' unexpectedly without feeling bad (since they know about the problem). I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to rely on it with somebody new, but thank you so much for the offer!