[Volk]

Hey Roosh, I'm curious about your gameplan about learning Russian. What is the challenge you are going to give yourself on the language learning project? What are the stakes you are setting for yourself? What are the deadlines you are imposing on you? What kind of method will you use?

Since you seem to have quite a history of learning languages, I really want to see how you tackle this kind of tasks. Thanks in advance!

[Akula]

(04-14-2013 06:51 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

I've been tackling this language in a half-assed way. I did all three units of Pimsleur and a couple hundred notecards. Then I got a notch using Russian (I'm still not sure how I pulled that off). After that? I slacked off. I only became proficient in tourist Russian. My Russian was actually just as good as when I arrived in Ukraine than when I left.

I took three detours since then: about 100 hours with Polish, 15 hours with French, and 20 hours refreshing my Spanish. But now, one year after Ukraine, it's clear to me: the language of my future is Russian. For feminine women and for adventure, for a man who wants to be challenged to the point of failure and who wants to earn his salt, this is the mountain to climb. I have delayed and procrastinated, I have rationalized and doubted, but now I am certain: I will become proficient in this language. It must be done.

Good luck go get 'em! Been here 4 years and would say the 3 months I spent learning Russian every day was where I made my biggest improvement. I've begun to stagnate at the intermediate level but living here is Russia is a big advantage for sure.

[Dr.Benway]

...

[presidentcarter]

(04-15-2013 01:40 PM)Dr.Benway Wrote:  

i would say to not even waste time with pimsleur unless its in some passive way like while you walk to work or ride the subway or something. Without a really good grasp of the grammar you will never be able to form proper sentences in russian. I studied it intensively at a russian university in the preparation faculty and it took about 8 months before i felt comfortable having conversations with people. this language is very tough.

I've learned a little listening to Pimsleur in the car when traveling and it's useful for throwing out a few lines at bars to Russian chicks. Other than that or "survival" speaking when visiting the country, I agree with you that it's largely useless. With only audio, you don't even REALLY know that sounds to make some of the time because you don't know the text and a lot of stuff can sound similar.

[hayesbrandon30]

(04-15-2013 01:40 PM)Dr.Benway Wrote:  

i would say to not even waste time with pimsleur unless its in some passive way like while you walk to work or ride the subway or something. Without a really good grasp of the grammar you will never be able to form proper sentences in russian. I studied it intensively at a russian university in the preparation faculty and it took about 8 months before i felt comfortable having conversations with people. this language is very tough.

how do you feel about your language ability now? would you say that you feel comfortable talking in russian?

because i basically, am gonna use this site to get a grasp of the language.

http://www.russianaccelerator.com/why-it-works

Then take an actual community college course in russian - but i have a feeling that having a group of people who are patient and understanding of your language weaknesses work and practice with you consistently is the key. because is kinda of the reverse of foreigners here in the USA coming up to us and saying

"hey can i practice my english with you" because not everyone is always gonna be so nice, understanding and caring.

its kinda like a child learning to ride a bike. The child needs training wheels first, then after he is strong enough and can hold balance he can ride fully.

[Dr.Benway]

...

[sachaFR]

Hey! Ive been lurking for a while,I guess it's time to post as I can make few recommendation on that subject. Ive been to russia and I loved the language, the women as well. I was looking for a new language to learn, I guess aftermy trip, my mind was made.

I start learning russian in mid august 2012, using anki for vocabulary: http://ankisrs.net/. You should try it. Constancy is the key, add vocabulary regularly and try to review it every day. If need to get this into a routine, it doesn't take you a long time. There is even an app for this software, you can synchronize it with the one on your computer and after be able to review your card everywhere and every time you have a short moment to kill.

I'm agree with Atilla, Princeton courses is a huge free resources. The courses are short, there is audio files (very important if your aim is to speak: you need to listen the language straight from the start.

Since mid september my routine is:

Do a chapter per two weeks. Add the new vocabulary in anki, review the vocabulary (every day) . I putthe audio files from the chapter in a mp3, and listen to it very often (in my car, when I go for errands, when I walk from my place to some bars etc..) It's helps you to acquire the vocabulary more easily and to recognize more quickly the words you know when you listen to russian people speaking together.


To correct the exercises that you have at the end of each courses, you have few options:

1/ do them and post on this websites: http://lang-8.com/ People are correcting mistakes for free. I stop doing that as it was taking too much time, and my aim is to speak the language not to write it.
(if you don't no have a Cyrillic keyboard : http://www.lexilogos.com/clavier/russkij.htm )

An other option is: https://www.italki.com/. There, you can find language partner for exchange (or teacher). Do the exercises with them and practice over skype. I have few contact from this website, but I never been able to skype with them as my internet connexion is very unstable.

Other option: find russian in your city and try to meet them to speak the language. Bonus otpion: bang one of them, and practice the exercises with her. Ive been seeing one for 3 months, and it's was the time my progress where the best, and my focus on the language was at the top.

To find them: courchsurfing, vk, going to uni to see if there is language exchange etc...

With internet, you dont need to be in the country where they speak a language to learn it, go there to use what you've learned home!

So long story short, be constant, even if some days it's only a review of new vocabulary for 15 minutes. Listen the audio files instead of music as much as you can while doing errands (or going to work etc ...). Practice whenever you can! Hope it will help some of you to get started.

PS: Sorry for my mistakes, english is not my main language.

[jimukr104]

I never known a foreigner who was actually FLUENT in Russian.But I suggest enrolling for a year of university studies in Russia. The cost is low and you will know 60% of the common language. I would do it in Russia, NOT Ukraine because most Ukrainians mix Russian with Ukrainian in every day speech.That was what somewhat confused me in Ukraine when I was an expat. To get good you need to talk in everyday situations BUT the majority of people I would interact was mixing the language up. I am talking about the food sellers, etc. Remember this culture is not very patiant when listening to you try to speak ,so get the basics down before studies.

[The Fantasist]

(04-15-2013 01:40 PM)Dr.Benway Wrote:  

i would say to not even waste time with pimsleur unless its in some passive way like while you walk to work or ride the subway or something. Without a really good grasp of the grammar you will never be able to form proper sentences in russian. I studied it intensively at a russian university in the preparation faculty and it took about 8 months before i felt comfortable having conversations with people. this language is very tough.

(04-15-2013 02:56 PM)Dr.Benway Wrote:  

i think this type of thing can be great to learn vocabulary, but in russian vocabulary alone can be quite useless, because of the declension of the nouns and adjectives. like in the video on the homepage they give you sobaka собака and ulitsa улица..which is fine when used as a subject. but when he uses them together in the sentence "look at the sobaka on the utlitsa"-this is incorrect in russian. what is correct is "look at the sobaku on the ulitse" (смотри на собаку на улитце)

you can see the words changed. if you heard these two words in a different declension you might think they are different words that denote a different noun altogether, when in fact the are the same. that sentence is also phrased a little bit strangely for russian too. "learning by context" is great for vocabulary but i believe its actually impossible to learn a language like you did as a child because now you already know a language, and so all of your learning will be filtered through the prism of english. this is just my two cents. learning in many different ways will help, but i would just be weary of any advertised methods of learning languages that try to avoid grammar because it isn't as "fun" or whatever. you need to know this stuff-especially for russian.

even russian school children spend years learning russian grammar in depth, much more so than we did in school for english.

I have to disagree with you somewhat in regards to how important grammar is when trying to make yourself understood in Russian. I think you are over stressing it a little. Personally I have little concept of the case system and agreement of adjectives etc. I don't know when to say меня or мне let alone how word endings change in relation to gender or case. However despite only relying on building vocabulary I have never had any problems being understood. What I mean is that every time I have not been understood it has always been due to a lack of vocabulary and never due to not having a good grammatical base. Just like when an American says "I'll write you", although a Brit would never say that and to us it is grammatically wrong,we still have no problem understanding it. What would make it hard to understand is if the speaker did not know the verb 'To write' whilst conveying the intent.

I would say to learners to decide what their aims are. If you want to just travel around and do tourist stuff on a trip or two then concentrate of vocabulary pretty much exclusively, no need to confuse yourself with the Gordian Knot of Russian grammar,you'll get proficient quicker and you will get by without trouble, up to a point.

The guys who need to study grammar along with vocabulary are guys like Roosh who have decided that their future will in some way be linked to Russian speaking countries and people. Then it's worth doing and will no doubt reward you greatly ( I hope this proves to be the case personally ) but even then I'd lean towards vocabulary building over deep grammar study. Lets face it once you got the cases sorted out you are well on the way and can survive without knowing all the verbs of motion etc.

Just my take.

[Dr.Benway]

...

[Roosh]

Quote:

Pimsleur I for Russian was fun and I felt motivated to keep going. Now I'm on lesson 22 with Russian II and it just feels like a chore. The vocab is slow and the sentences so repetitive and dry that it's hard to even focus. My brother in law is Russian and says the speaker sounds Georgian so my pronunciation becomes exaggerated with a weird accent. He also said that the sentence structure taught is flat out wrong or at a minimum not optimal for sounding smooth or natural in many cases.

Don't stop, keep going. I also was hitting a wall with Pimsleur and almost gave up, but I finished all three units before going to Ukraine. I felt like it wasn't going to help, but after one painful week, I was getting into a groove, and creating sentences on the fly. Most importantly, I was understood. The formal/informal conjugation is inconsequential for a beginner. You can use formal on everyone, though unit 3 does teach you informal conjugation.

Don't sleep on Pimsleur. Guys pass on it now because there are fancier options, but it's the first thing I do when tackling a language, and I re-do the courses again and again.

(04-15-2013 11:28 AM)Volk Wrote:  

Hey Roosh, I'm curious about your gameplan about learning Russian. What is the challenge you are going to give yourself on the language learning project? What are the stakes you are setting for yourself? What are the deadlines you are imposing on you? What kind of method will you use?

Since you seem to have quite a history of learning languages, I really want to see how you tackle this kind of tasks. Thanks in advance!

My strategy right now is Pimsleur and Michel Thomas for audio, and then working on one or two text resources at a time. Then I finish a resource, and do another one, mining them all the while for notecards (that I put in Anki). I gave it a test run in Polish and my progress was very rapid in only a month.

I'm thinking about an intensive course for a month or so in June. I want to be forced to study more than my typical max of 1 hour a day.

[Menace]

Roosh, do you plan on doing a course in Russia (a la Vorkuta?) Now would be the time, because I doubt you'd want to be there in the winter.

[Mersault]

I wrote of it when i first joined this forum. I have been around a little and there only two countries, cities in fact, where i can imagine living once i dilute the adventure bug within me. Besides London, my home, of course. And they are Buenos Aires and Moscow. Both are too far from the sea, and Moscow's winter is pretty lame, but the standard of women, well, i wouldn't be wrong and i would be right if i said they were fantastic. Not merely the way they look, although that is the most important, but i also speak of their mannerisms and all the other stuff that make up the whole. Actually, i prefer Buenos Aires a little, in terms of what it offers (Moscow has few tennis courts / English cinemas / shit food etc) but i like the Russian fevered mind mentality. Everybody is either a live for today gangster takes all or a live for yesterday nostalgia rules my being type. Besides the pragmatic boring types, nobody pays to much attention to tomorrow, beyond that which is absolutely necessary. ie. the milk is going bad.
It struck me as the Russian way.
Actually, it is probably all bullshit and i was hoping it was that way. It's probably just like everywhere else. Bunch of retarded fools who pine for tomorrow and binge themselves on false self deceptive hope and denying themselves the nutrients prevalent in portions of reality. Next year or the one that follows that.....and whatnot. Nobody knows anything guys. Just passing time. Drink whiskey. Bang some woman. Wander around the Tretyakov gallery and day game. Eh. Plus they have an obsessions with flowers and giving them to women. Oh they never understood Tarkovsky's Sacrifice. He was speaking to the nation but the nation was too busy getting drunk celebrating women's day. It's about letting the plants grow. Why prune it? Why prune?


Learning Russian > not learning Russian.

[Hyperion]

The great thing about Russian is that the web resources for learning the language are outstanding.

http://www.masterrussian.com

http://en.rian.ru/learning_russian/

RT also has a page on learning the language full of information.

[Atilla]

I'm a big fan of Assimil, which uses bilingual texts. Many polyglots begin with this one. It's a 20 minutes per day course of 5-6 months to fluency. One man on the forum link below says he got a job in Germany as a translator of technical documents from English to German after using Assimil. If I had one source for learning a language, it's Assimil.

Michel Thomas is great for learning grammar. Very easy to follow and you're learning along with the other students. Pimsleur can be useful because it gives the student a chance to guess at what the sentence will be before a native speaks.

Squeeze in mp3s during free time.
Lingq.com offers free mp3s with translations for many languages.

There are some incredible people on this forum, probably the best source for language learners:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/default.asp

One of the things that holds people back the most is stressing too much about grammar. Just focus on speaking, allowing yourself to make mistakes, and the grammar can wait. Read and listen to the language a lot and grammar will start to just sink in. As you continue to immerse yourself in a language and really study the sentences, you will catch on to the minor grammar rules.

Also, don't spend too much time on beginner materials. One of the biggest rookie mistakes people make is being afraid to move on to the next level without absolutely mastering the beginner stuff.

[Hooligan Harry]

Need to get yourself to Russia Roosh. The best way to learn is going to be to just throw yourself into the deep end eventually. I was lucky enough to have paid tutors and classes for a while, but as one would expect you learn far more quickly when you have no choice but to speak Russian daily. 10-15 years ago, outside of St P and Moscow, so few people spoke English that you were fucked without Russian.

I dont know if its a hard language or not, other than some basic Greek I never bothered to try and learn anything else. I found it hard as hell and I get rusty quite quickly if I am away for a while. Always struggle with tense. People who understand language say its hard and I found it hard, but once I got past a certain point it came quickly. Once you have a vocab of about 1000 words or so, you are golden.

Russian is a good choice. I have been wanting to get Spanish under the belt which would cover 3 of the 4 most widely spoken for me. Just have not had the time

[Chaos]

I'm in the Russian far east right now. I only have a few lessons left of the last unit of the Pimsleur program.
What could be a good continuing course? Still going to be here for 10 weeks so I hope my Russian will improve during that time.
But I need to maintain my Russian after I'm going out of Russia,otherwiseI will forget it very quickly.
No way in hell I'm allowing that to happen.

[ChrisGambi]

Any tips on where to find these gems? Not much on youtube..

[BoiBoi]

(04-14-2013 07:03 PM)Technics Wrote:  

My best way of finding conversation partners online: Go on sharedtalk-->Bounce them to skype and vk. After you get 20-30 friends on both, pretty much someone will always be online when you sign on, no matter the time of day, and they all want to talk because you found them on sharedtalk.

I second that option. I'm using it to learn Português and it works great. Sidenote, my talk buddy is a hot chick from Sao Paulo...

[Atilla]

(04-17-2013 01:40 AM)Chaos Wrote:  

I'm in the Russian far east right now. I only have a few lessons left of the last unit of the Pimsleur program.
What could be a good continuing course? Still going to be here for 10 weeks so I hope my Russian will improve during that time.
But I need to maintain my Russian after I'm going out of Russia,otherwiseI will forget it very quickly.
No way in hell I'm allowing that to happen.

If you want an all-audio course: Michel Thomas Advanced.
Also, review some of those Pimsleur lessons. Even if you feel you know it, you don't truly learn until you review. This goes for all educational materials.

If you're looking to learn some serious Russian, many people have given very positive reviews of the free Princeton Russian Course.

My Method:

Listen to the Russian audio while looking over the English text.
Listen again to the Russian audio while looking over the Russian text.
Read the Russian text out loud.
**This is the most important part: begin reading the Russian text again, but this time, repeat each sentence out loud without looking at the text. Just read the text, look away, and repeat out loud.

Listen to the Russian audio without any text, and if you have a general understanding of what is being said, you're done. You can add the audio to your mp3 player if you like.

Don't try to memorize anything. Just understand what is being said, repeat the sentences without looking at the text, and trust that the Russian will gradually sink in. It usually takes 15-20 minutes per lesson, not including some quick review of previous lessons, and I'm done for the day.

After you've gone through half the lessons of the course, from the first lesson, begin translating the English text into Russian.

That is the Assimil method in a nutshell.
My favorite part about learning languages is when I wake up in the morning feeling like I've begun understanding a major grammatical concept, even when I'm still in the sleepy dummy mode. It seems to be most likely to happen after studying the language a lot the previous day.

When you've spent many hours learning something, your brain sinks the information in and puts it together during your sleep.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Russian without bullshit?

Bez sranja, I guess.

[POHammer]

(04-18-2013 02:18 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Russian without bullshit?

Bez sranja, I guess.

That translates into without shitting ( the verb).

без дерьма or even better
без говна

[fjod]

roosh, ask me for any help with your Russian
(the guy who translated that Ukrainian show)

[soup]

Let's just hope that by the time you've learned Russian, the Russian girls won't be spoiled by American cultures' woman.

[Lika]

Roosh, I told you so when you were in Ukraine...

The only thing that prevents you is the fact that Russians, on the whole, are extremely racist and don't like dark skinned or "persian looking" people (that they brand "Caucasus").

You should perhaps go to Russia first, spend a few months and then decide if Russian is the language you really need.