Russian language: no more bullshit
06-05-2016, 05:03 PM
Hi everyone. This is my first post. I'm glad to have found this interesting thread about russian language. I wanted to share my experience about learning it. My mother tongue is a romance language. I have been studying russian for six years now and more seriously (everyday) for the last three years. My schedule is very busy with little free time but with dedication I managed to attain a B2 level (I have not taken an official examination). I was in Russia recently for some weeks and was able to conversate freely with friends, acquaintances and new people I'd meet. The one time where I most struggle to express myself as in my mother tongue was when I was trying to explain my view on the financial markets, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. I may post about my trip in another thread. As a black man, I had a wonderful time in Russia and only spoke in russian, including on the phone.
I started with the Assimil method and used a modified version of the shadowing technique that the american linguist Alexander Arguelles advocates (you can google him). Every time I was getting to class, to work, doing household chores, exercising or else, I'd be listening to the lessons and repeating aloud (or whispering when in public). When you do shadowing every day, the words are going to stick to your mind and you'll remember them permanently at some point. Peer-reviewed scientific articles have demonstrated that if you repeat aloud something that you read or hear, the retention will be greater.
Assimil offers great grammar explanations and you have the translation of each lesson with the audio. You can buy it in different languages depending of your mother tongue.
When I completed half of the lessons, I started reading and doing exercises with Schaum's Russian Grammar. I think that this is one of the best grammar book out there. Some people think that grammar is not that important and everything will become natural. I respect their opinion but I don't agree. Grammar is a key that helps you understand the laws and rules of a language. By knowing these rules, language learning becomes easier, faster and allows you to formulate sentences that you might not have heard before, but you know are correct. I believe that by organizing language into rules and patterns, grammar helps you to make language clear, understandable and simple. For a non-slavic native speaker, I think all of this is even more important when learning a language such as russian. Of course, doing grammar exercises is better then just reading a grammar book. It is an active process and you'll learn more. After doing exercises and correcting my mistakes, I'd read the chapter related. Later on I used The big silver book of russian verbs by Franke. Although not essential, I like that book since it gives you many concrete examples for a lot of verbs. It explains you what prepositions/cases to use with them.
After that I continued ''shadowing'' with tales, songs, books I downloaded on the internet. I would read the text at night, search in the dictionary for new words and write them down in a notebook. When something wasn't clear grammatically, I would have recourse to Schaum's Russian Grammar.
Then, I started to go to russian meetings/events in my city, etc. I'm lucky enough to live a big city with a significant russophone community. I made some russian-speaking friends.
I found videos on Youtube with subtitles. As mentioned on this thread, Starmedia is a great channel. Golden. The english and russian subtitles match perfectly the audio. This is not always the case with movies with subtitles. I also started to watch contemporary and soviet movies.
I shadowed the audio of Ultimate russian advanced by Living language and read the whole book. Great resource. Then, I started to read some short stories with bilingual books, for example, Russian stories: a dual-language book edited by Gleb Struve. Classical litterature like this book will not help you that much if your sole goal is to speak but I like russian litterature.
Then I started to take lessons focused on conversation with a native russian speaker two hours a week. She had no formal teacher training. We just talked about different subjects and she would correct my mistakes. Sometimes she would write down some useful words or expressions for me if they came up during our conversations. I later started to do more lessons on italki. I think it is not productive to take lessons if you cannot already conversate at a basic level. I bought, shadowed and read another advanced assimil method but I don't think it is available in english yet.
So this was the way I did it. About 10 minutes to one hour EVERYDAY. Sometimes more with shadowing. I still do today. I've never lived in a russian-speaking country. Now I watch russian channels/bloggers/prankers on youtube, read some novels and the news on the internet (especially lenta.ru and meduza.io), hang out at russian events and with friends, etc. I still make mistakes and will struggle if the subject of the conversation becomes technical.
Here is a small text in russian that I wrote some time ago on how I learned russian if you want some practice :-)
Часто люди спрашивают у меня о том, как я выучил русский язык. В начале, я использовал книгу (Assimil), в которой есть сто уроков на русском с переводами на родной язык. Большинство уроков - обычные разговоры между людьми. Со временем, уроки становятся труднее и длиннее. В каждом уроке, есть несколько объяснении грамматики. К тому же, есть записи и можно послушать все уроки. Поскольку у меня мало времени, когда я добрался до работы, до университета и возвращался домой, то я слушал записи и также повторял все шепотом. Я брал пример с лингвиста Alexander Arguelles, который рекомендует этот метод. Я заметил, что таким образом гораздо легче запомнить новые слова. Это тоже хорошо для того, чтобы практиковать и увеличивать произношение. В то же время, я читал и делал упражнения грамматики в книге "Schaum's russian grammar." До сих пор делаю упражнения и перечитываю эту книгу когда что-нибудь непонятно.Потихоньку, я начал слушать сказки со совпадающими текстами. Я нашел в Youtube видео со субтитрами. Записывал новые слава и перечитывал их иногда. Я начал посещать русскоязычные мероприятия в моем городе и заговорил с трудностью. Я читаю новости на русском и смотрю фильмы. В последние месяцы, я занимаюсь с репетитором в моем городе. Встречаемся в кафе. До этого, я уже мог достаточно бегло говорить, но мне нужна практика. Продолжаю делать много ошибок.