Does anyone on this site speak or understand Russian?

DaftChris

I had an interest in the Russian language a few years back, but drifted away from it because of it's difficulty.

I've recently gotten interested in wanting to learn it again, but i don't have the proper means of doing so. Are there any members here who can speak or at least understand Russian? What are great ways of getting into the groove of learning such a difficult language? Is there an effective way of learning without classes or needing a tutor?

And can someone explain the noun cases and make them easier to understand?

Bekenze

Leon Basin.

I think Dakini might. Or maybe someone else.

Dakini

Sagat claims to have taught himself Russian. He learned by reading children's books, and finding native speakers for help. The first thing you have to do, obviously, is learn the alphabet. Sagat says the "Rosetta Stone" programs are worthless, but someone else here found them very helpful. An essential component for learning any language is the aural component--if you can hear the language, you can let your ears to half the job of soaking it up. If you can at least get a cd of it, you can play it in your car, at home while doing chores, etc. What is your language learning experience up to now?

Dakini

Think of any case system this way:
English has the remnants of a case system.
I , he, she-- nominative case (subject of sentence)
me, him, her -- accusative (or objective) case (object of verb, and indirect obj, as well)
my, his, her -- possessive case

add cases as needed. In Latin: locative, indicating place where something is located.

Does that help, for starters?

DaftChris

@Dakini

It does help. Quite a lot actually.

As for my language learning experience: I know only basic Spanish and a few random words of German and French. Russian, and various other Eastern European languages are the ones I really want to learn.

I've thought about finding a Russian pen/e-pal to, not only help me learn, but to also connect me to the world outside of the U.S.

compassionate_warrior

Where in the U.S. do you live? There are Russian communities everywhere, where you could find someone to practice with. Do you have a textbook? This is an ambitious project you're considering. Even Russians who have grown up speaking it at home, in the West, have trouble with the case system, if English or another language have had too strong an influence since childhood.

Knowing German grammar would help you with the case system in Russian, but you only have some vocabulary, not the grammar. You may want to learn some basic German first, as a warm-up to Russian. I don't think this is something you can expect to find on-line tutoring in, insofar as it's too complex to cover on an online forum. Find a good textbook with CD's or DVD's. After you've made some progress, try to find a native speaker to practice with, those would be my recommendations.

compassionate_warrior

@DaftChris Bulgarian doesn't have a case system. If it's East European languages you're after, you could start there.

DaftChris

@compassionate_warrior

I live in Augusta, Georgia and the vast majority of non-English speakers speak Spanish.
Although, since I'm a cashier at a big box retail store, I've had various people come through my lane that spoke languages that I never knew Augusta had. Including Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Romanian, Portuguese, Armenian, Indonesian, Serbian, various east Asian languages and, yes, even some Russian.

I think I'm going to search for a native speaker; whether they're from where I live or in the form of a pen-pal.

I tried learning from a book on my own, but the noun cases killed me.

Mountains

I would agree that learning the Cyrillic alphabet might be a useful thing to do. It looks daunting at first, but it's really not that difficult. Many are just like English. Just know that there are letters that indicate sounds that we don't normally make in English (such as "ts" as in "tsar", and a gutteral "chu" (my spelling) like if you're trying to hock a loogie, and "shch" like "freSH CHeese").

The good news is that pronunciation in Russian doesn't seem to be nearly as fixed as it is in English.

DaftChris

Has anyone used, or know someone who has used, Interpals.net? It seems like a great place to connect with people from around the world and it has a language exchange program.

If I where to learn Bulgarian (or any other Slavic language first), would it help me with Russian later on?

compassionate_warrior

Bulgarian would help you with Russian vocabulary. But you would still face the formidable case system studying any other Slavic language. Romanian also has a case system. It's like Spanish/Italian, but with a case system. If I'm not mistaken, Russian's case system is the most complex of the Slavic languages. It might be best to bite the bullet and tackle the whole enchilada at once. Very ambitious, as I said earlier. Since I have no inkling your level of language-learning talent, it's hard to know what to advise.

The best way to learn the case system may be to memorize phrases or short sentences using the cases. If you hear and repeat something often enough, it stays in your memory. Then, when you need a certain phrase, it comes to you automatically. You don't need to think, analyze, remember which case goes where, what the right ending is, and patch something coherent together. I have the impression that's how the Rosetta Stone system works. It's a more natural way to learn.

lamaramadingdong

Nyet.

DaftChris

Da!

compassionate_warrior

Почему-бы нет? (Why not?) :cool:

Mountains

Для хороших отношений между нашими двумя странами!

Mountains

Why does everything look like "kaopectate" in Russian?

Mountains

If I where to learn Bulgarian (or any other Slavic language first), would it help me with Russian later on?

I can't speak to Russian specifically, but I've found if you want to learn a language, learn the language. If you're going to go to all the trouble of learning Bulgarian, which is spoken in exactly one country on earth, why not just learn Russian and be done with it? That'd be sort of like learning Romanian so you'd have an easier time in Latin later on. A waste of time.

I can tell you for certain however that learning another slavic language like Czech or Polish would be an utter waste of your time. Other than their slavic origins and a few vocabulary words, they have not much more in common with Russian than Romanian does with English.

compassionate_warrior

Have you seen this one: РЕСТОРАН pronounced "restoRAHN", meaning: restaurant.

@DaftChris Why do you want to learn East European languages?

compassionate_warrior

The better analogy would be that the Slavic languages have as much in common with each other as Spanish does to Portugese. Spanish and Portugese speakers can communicate with each other. I've seen a Polish speaker make herself understood to Russian speakers by choosing her words carefully.