[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/phpbb/session.php on line 583: sizeof(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/phpbb/session.php on line 639: sizeof(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable
Ice-Pick Lodge forums • Learning russian...
It is currently 28 Mar 2024, 19:39
Author Message
 Post subject: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 05 Feb 2010, 04:14 
Offline

Joined:

15 Jan 2010, 03:06

Posts: 35

Hi all!
So... after delaying it for about a couple of years, The Void acted as a catalyst and I'm decided to force myself to learn russian 8).
I've been looking for some online lessons or something and found these:
http://www.russianlessons.net/
http://www.russianforeveryone.com/
http://study-russian.blogspot.com/
would it be too much to ask to any of the russophones (is that an actual word?) around for an opinion on the matter? maybe some pointers?


Thanks in advance!
Regards.


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 05 Feb 2010, 04:54 
Offline
Старый Добрый Эль
User avatar

Joined:

03 Apr 2005, 20:32

Posts: 4529

Location: Зараженная Москва

First two look nice and gradual for starters!
http://slovari.yandex.ru/ - also, here's a good online dictionary to get you starded. I'd recommend, that you download ABBYY Lingvo somewhere, so that you always have a dictionary at hand. And whatever you do - don't use Lipson's English for foreigners. ;)

I'll look for some more in the morning - need to go sleep for now.

Удачи! ;)
_________________
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

---- Alexander Pope


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 05 Feb 2010, 04:58 
Offline

Joined:

29 Aug 2004, 16:52

Posts: 2152

Location: Россия, Москва

Surely, this one is a must:
http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/

Are you determined? I can warn you beforehand that the language has many sets of endings for different types of words: nouns decline, adjectives agree (participles agree too!) and the verbs conjugate and govern. You are going to make stupid blunders for a while (you know, even children do not confuse these endings as often as you are going to). Don't give up.

You may also try this very scary book:
http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/ ... ussian.pdf
Of course, it is for an advanced level. Otherwise it won't assist you much in learning the language, but will help to fall asleep quickly in the evening if used properly.

Do not forget that Russian is an Indo-European language, after all. Its structure is slightly different from the languages you know, but still quite familiar.


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 05 Feb 2010, 05:19 
Offline

Joined:

15 Jan 2010, 03:06

Posts: 35

Thanks a lot!
I'll keep you posted on what I find.


Regards!


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 06 Feb 2010, 14:37 
Offline

Joined:

15 Jan 2010, 03:06

Posts: 35

Quote:
Are you determined? I can warn you beforehand that the language has many sets of endings for different types of words: nouns decline, adjectives agree (participles agree too!) and the verbs conjugate and govern. You are going to make stupid blunders for a while (you know, even children do not confuse these endings as often as you are going to). Don't give up.
Well... right now I'm feeling pretty determined :D
The whole "all words decline" thing feels a bit like latin... tried it once... can't say I'm fluent in it :P
Life's all about making mistakes, if you were to feel stupid for them, well... it would suck to be you ;)
Quote:
You may also try this very scary book:
http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/ ... ussian.pdf
Of course, it is for an advanced level. Otherwise it won't assist you much in learning the language, but will help to fall asleep quickly in the evening if used properly.

Do not forget that Russian is an Indo-European language, after all. Its structure is slightly different from the languages you know, but still quite familiar.
Will check it out! Probably I'll just download it until I feel my brain won't pour out of my ears at the mere sight of it... but eventually I'll get to it ;)

My university has got a couple of "Rosetta Stone" licenses, and they do have russian, so I'll check it out next week and tell you guys about it... seems pretty awesome but still need to try it first hand.


Thank you very much for your comments!


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 06 Feb 2010, 17:02 
Offline
User avatar

Joined:

25 Feb 2007, 00:40

Posts: 410

Location: оттуда

the toughest thing about Russian is verb types, 'cause they are practically inconcievable to an English native and there are way too many exceptions to common rules. You'll have a very hard time with the verbs. The second thing is the nouns. They change in weird (for foreigners) ways to make agree with adjectives and other nouns. The third is the word order, it's not strict and in fact it can depict different logical stress, for example in English you can only say "I love you", in Russian you can literally say it in any word order you like, the meaning will remain, but the logical stress will change. If you say "I love you - Я люблю тебя" you mean that it is I who loves you, not smb. else. if you say "Love I you - люблю я тебя" you mean that it is the feeling of love I expless, not some other feeling. If you say "You I love - тебя я люблю" you mean that it is you who I love, not some other person. Don't get confused.
_________________
A man with a spade -
Not hunchbacked, not lame -
Knows nothing, but slaughter.
No use to cry quarter!


If you do not describe your attack in a gloriously cinematic fashion, the difficulty increases one step. (c)


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 07 Feb 2010, 02:51 
Offline

Joined:

15 Jan 2010, 03:06

Posts: 35

Hi there! thanks for your thoughts.
Actually, I'm a Spanish native speaker and we too have a pretty loose (albeit not as loose as russian) word order and nouns and adjectives change in weird ways in order to agree in number and voice with the rest of the sentence.
I guess that as long as I get to see the analogy between my mother tongue and russian everything will be fine (that's how I eventually learned english, although the analogy in that case was far from direct), I've already read a bit about plurals formation and it makes perfect sense.
My weak spot this far is pronunciation and reading, I've got noone to speak to (tried pulling my brother into learning too but to no avail) and I keep mixing up the "hushes".

Thanks again!


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 07 Feb 2010, 12:04 
Offline
User avatar

Joined:

25 Feb 2007, 00:40

Posts: 410

Location: оттуда

Oh, Spanish changes everything.
I studied Spanish at school (although I didn't pay much attention to it and my attendance was bas as well) and IMO it was the easiest Romanic language to learn for a Russian. As I remember the verbs in Spanish change much like they do in Russian, you only need to learn that in Russian nouns and adjectives change too. Something's telling me you will manage it.
_________________
A man with a spade -
Not hunchbacked, not lame -
Knows nothing, but slaughter.
No use to cry quarter!


If you do not describe your attack in a gloriously cinematic fashion, the difficulty increases one step. (c)


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 07 Feb 2010, 14:11 
Offline

Joined:

15 Jan 2010, 03:06

Posts: 35

Quote:
verbs in Spanish change much like they do in Russian
I understand they do indeed: they change for tense, number, gender and person, think is similar to Russian (you capitalize that word?)
Quote:
in Russian nouns and adjectives change too
So they do in Spanish! :) Adjectives change in order to agree with their object in gender and number, and we have masculine and feminine nouns as well, is this similar to Russian too?

Thanks for all the support guys!


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 07 Feb 2010, 14:17 
Offline
User avatar

Joined:

07 Mar 2009, 12:11

Posts: 820

Location: Ярославль

Quote:
Russian (you capitalize that word?)
We don't. The English do.

With the verbs yes, it's similar plus)

Besides masculine and feminine we have neutral, like Germans do. Three genders plus some peculiarities)


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 07 Feb 2010, 14:33 
Offline

Joined:

15 Jan 2010, 03:06

Posts: 35

Quote:
We don't. The English do.
LOL, so trying to pick up some "writing etiquette" I wrote the last post in the "wrong" capitalization convention :P (in case anyone cares, in spanish we don't capitalize them either, except in very particular cases).
Quote:
Besides masculine and feminine we have neutral
I think that old spanish had a "neutral" gender too, but fell in disrepute later...

BTW, english people often say "spanish" when the language's name is indeed "castillian" ("castellano") ;)

Regards!


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 08 Feb 2010, 12:53 
Offline
In Turgor!
User avatar

Joined:

01 Sep 2008, 06:09

Posts: 902

Yes, the latin-hispanic languages are the best to "translate" to russian. Or so my german teacher used to claim.


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 10 Feb 2010, 07:43 
Offline

Joined:

11 May 2008, 20:18

Posts: 9

I'm considering learning Russian myself. But there's plenty of interesting languages, and I don't have time to learn them all :P My German is far from perfect, Icelandic is very interesting, and for some reason I want to learn a language with a logographic writing system sometime.

How hard is Russian? Is it comparable to say, German when it comes to nasty grammar?

My mother tongue is Norwegian, I'm fairly good at English, and I know enough German to read a simple-ish book, or watch a movie without subtitles. (I also understand Swedish, Danish and Dutch)


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 10 Feb 2010, 17:09 
Offline

Joined:

29 Aug 2004, 16:52

Posts: 2152

Location: Россия, Москва

I'm afraid, in Russian your problem is basic grammar rather than nasty grammar. Complicated thoughts are put in Russian in much the same way as in other European languages. However, verbs, nouns and adjectives have around 10 forms to fit the role they carry in the sentence (grammatical case, or gender/number, or person: verbs are different in 1st person/2nd person/ 3rd person, singular and plural). Even little children use this forms more or less properly, as it is very hard for a native to chose the wrong one in simple sentences. Surely, if you say something long and profound, you may want to rephrase the sentence when you are already saying it, which will - formally - result in "incorrect" structure. Since one half of the sentence doesn't fit the other well.

You don't have to worry about declensions and personal verb forms in Japanese. It doesn't have any. However, in Japanese you usually should be aware who is speaking to who (if you use polite language), numerous kanji and grammar. That is, the sentence structures of Japanese are quite different from those of the Western European languages, and in contrast to Russian, such things as "adjectives", "pronouns" and so on don't map well onto its structure. On the other hand, this language seems more useful than Russian is...


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 10 Feb 2010, 18:07 
Offline
In Turgor!
User avatar

Joined:

01 Sep 2008, 06:09

Posts: 902

That reminds me of our verbs which can take the following forms:

- Simple Present
- Simple Past
- Past Imperfect
- Simple Future
- Present Future
- Present Continuous
- Past Continuous
- Conditional

Mixed with 3 moods one can apply to a verb:
- Imperative
- Indicative
- Subjunctive

And I probably forgot a few forms :D


Fun fun fun :D


 Profile  
Quote  
 Post subject: Re: Learning russian...
PostPosted: 11 Mar 2010, 08:14 
Offline
User avatar

Joined:

07 Oct 2008, 04:44

Posts: 53

Location: UK

I was trying to learn Russian for a few years, but gave up. I found it much more difficult than the little Chinese that I learnt. :P

Then six months ago I took up a Polish night class and it was amazing to see the similarities with Russian (as an outsider). Even though they are very different it felt like I had a huge head-start. I want to go back to Russian at some point soon to learn it properly, but I don't want to confuse myself yet.

Also, Halfgild Wynac is right. Basic grammar is a big problem, but if you're familiar with Latin then you've probably got a clue about what you're in for. :wink:

P.S - Rosetta Stone is awesome. It will give you a great intuitive sense of the language, but you'll want to use it mainly as a supplement to your learning.


 Profile  
Quote  
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  



[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/vendor/twig/twig/lib/Twig/Extension/Core.php on line 1275: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron