My opinion of various Russian learning resources

Discussion in 'Language Resources' started by Big_Dog, Mar 25, 2014.

  1. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I was recently asked which Russian resources I found useful, and which ones I didn't find useful. So here's a quick summary; I might do full reviews on these products later. Keep in mind that although the "not useful" products didn't work well with my language plan, that doesn't necessarily make them bad products. They are listed in the approximate order I used them.

    Beginner's Russian Script - useful, but doesn't include things like vowel reduction
    Pimsleur Russian (all levels) - useful
    Google Translate - useful
    Word Reference - useful
    Anki - useful
    RussianPod 101 - useful
    Shared Talk - useful
    Skype - useful
    Michel Thomas Russian (all levels) - useful
    LSI Russian School St. Petersburg - not useful, but the homestay was very useful
    Princeton Russian Course - not useful, but the pronunciation summary was useful
    Russian Wictionary - useful
    Assimil Russian - not useful, but the tables in the back were useful
    Penguin Russian Course - useful
    Voroniny - useful
    LingQ - useful
    Russian Podcasts - useful
    Novamova Russian School Kiev - not useful
    italki - useful, but it takes trial and error to get a good tutor
    lang-8 - useful, but I now prefer paying a cheap tutor because correcting others takes a lot of time
    A Taste of Russian podcasts - useful
    Russian movies with Russian subtitles - useful (too lazy to list them all here)
    Stelle and tastyonions like this.
  2. Solfrid Cristina

    Solfrid Cristina Member VIP member

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    This is an extremely useful list, but I was surprised to see that almost the only thing you found totally useless, was what gave my Russian a huge boost - NovaMova in Kyiv. Were you too advanced for the group they put you in?
  3. BAnna

    BAnna Active Member VIP member

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    Thank you for this. I've just started learning Russian this year and at times, it feels like trying to chew concrete blocks (or maybe I'm just a blockhead?). Thoughts like, "I'm too old, what's the point, etc." run through my head. Of course, it really isn't necessary for me to strive for perfection on the one hand or to beat myself up for not striving for perfection on the other. If I needed this language for survival, it might be a different story.
    My approach is a long, slow, at times frustrating, but definitely interesting stumble-crawl and I may not get too far. Even if I end up deciding to stop with Russian at the end of this year, I've already learned a lot of interesting things about the language and culture, and it will have been worth the effort. Currently I'm using Pimsleur, putting my own vocabulary words into Lingq, and working through some textbooks and videos for high school students (quite slow, but I am making gradual progress).
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  4. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Nothing is really totally useless - it was just a yes/no type thing. I had a really bad experience at Novamova. I had private classes, 90 min/day, 5 days a week for 4 weeks. The first 2 weeks the teacher was really good. Then she made me evaluate here. After that, she was a little mean, and really sarcastic. Very difficult to even finish my classes, which I paid dearly for. What was your experience like?
  5. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Nice post. Good luck, and let us know if we can help in any way. It's really cool that there are so many Russian learners here.
  6. Solfrid Cristina

    Solfrid Cristina Member VIP member

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    I have been there twice. The first time I was there I had private classes as well, for two weeks. I had a very sweet teacher from Eastern Ukraine. We both were respectful and kind to each other. The second time I had a combination of group classes and private classes, which I preferred since it gets a bit boring to be on your own. If you started having problems with the teacher you should have asked for a change. Maria, the director s really, really good about that sort of thing. I had lots of things I needed her to change, and there was never anything she could not fix. I learned a ton while I was there, and I am still on Facebook with my second teacher. If things quiet down a bit, I plan to go again in August, this time with my daughter.

    It sounds really weird and totally incomprehensible how one of your evaluations would lead to her becoming mean and sarcastic. I wonder how that might happen :)
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  7. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    You are not the only one :)
  8. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    I know what you mean. I have to confess I've become something of a Lang-8 parasite. Because the languages I'm studying there have a relatively small number of learners on the site and a relatively large number of native speakers wanting to learn English, I tend to get a lot of corrections more or less regardless of my point rating. Traditional-Character Mandarin especially is barely studied, but there are tons of Taiwanese on the site, so if I post anything, I tend to get flooded with 5 to 10 corrections in very short order. As I've spent more time on the site, I've gotten really lazy, especially since the influence of points on your receipt of corrections only lasts what, three days? Correcting some lengthy essay and getting a huge point payoff only to realize that I don't really feel like writing anything for the next few days means I have to be in an extremely generous mood to do it, and because my individual writings tend to get multiple corrections, the benefit gets cancelled out very quickly even if I do write something.

    Sorry, I know this doesn't have anything to do with Russian in particular. I just would like it if the Lang-8 fellow got his act together a bit more. I love the general idea behind his site, but the implementation disincentivizes me from using it the way it's meant to be used. I know English learners on the site often wait a long time for corrections, and not uncommonly end up not getting any at all (my Korean co-worker would often not get any corrections unless I went and corrected her myself), but I've got limited time and I'm not going to spend a half hour correcting an essay only to have those points wiped out when I write a scant few sentences of Mandarin and then get a dozen superfluous corrections, especially since I'll get the corrections whether I bother correcting others or not.
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  9. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    Perhaps more on topic, a question: I've toyed with the idea of approaching Russian before, but are there any high quality dictionary apps available? The ones I've seen on the iTunes store largely looked like trash. I want features like clearly-listed grammatical gender for nouns, word-stress indication, and the ability to input any inflected form of a word and still find the definition. Have you seen such a dictionary available for a smart phone?
  10. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Actually, I didn't know all that. I had an account there for years, but only used it for about a month very recently. It might interest you to know that lingQ has some sort of mutual-correction system now too, but I'm not sure if it's free.
    I don't even own a smart phone. Maybe kikenyoy can answer this...
  11. kikenyoy

    kikenyoy Administrator Staff Member

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    Sorry, no. I haven't found anything good either.
  12. Ogrim2

    Ogrim2 New Member

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    Nice list of Russian resources, but you have not included Colloquial Russian. I find it good, but maybe because I prefer a rather traditional, grammar-based approach, and the Colloquial series is very much built up that way. I should say that I like the books, not the audio, which does not include all text from the book, but instead has an obnoxious British lady instructing you to listen to this, repeat that, answer thus...

    Personally I also found Assimil Russian quite useful, at least as far as the audio is concerned (to supplement Collquial'l lack of good audio).

    And finally I would add another excellent resource, at least for those at an intermediate learning stage: on-line newspapers and their corresponding Facebook pages. I subscribe to Коммерсанть and Комсомольская правда on FB and find it very useful to get this short news alerts and texts in Russian, with links to the longer articles if I feel like reading more.

    I also haven't found any really good dictionary app for Russian, nor can I recommend any of the Kindle-based dictionaries you can find on Amazon. So I mostly rely on my Oxford Pocket Dictionary Russian-English/English-Russian. (By the way, you need really big pockets for that one...)
  13. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    This was just a list of resources I've actually at least tried to use. Thanks for the additional info though.
  14. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    Well, having spent some time now scrounging on the Android store, I've found that the Oxford Russian Dictionary is probably the best app available there. It seems to have a reasonable vocabulary selection, and it includes both word stress and gender (something most electronic dictionaries on the Android store bizarrely do not do). It's available for a free one day trial, but after that it's not cheap (compared to other dictionary applications, of course; compared to an actual paper version of the book it's likely reasonably priced).

    The urge to start learning Russian is growing. I should probably fight it; I've still got a lot of work to do with Mandarin, and I had intended on starting Japanese next. Russian (and everything about Russia) has a strange attractiveness though.
  15. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    This isn't an app, but I'd like to point out Russian Wictionary is the only one I know of that gives conjugation tables of nearly every verb. It shows the perfective/imperfective counterpart, stress, etc. Most verb conjugation tables only do about 500 verbs. Russian verbs are quite irregular, contrary to what I hear, so this resource is very helpful.
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  16. aiko

    aiko New Member

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  17. Stelle

    Stelle Active Member VIP member

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    Interesting thread! I'm moving back to Toronto in a few months (fingers crossed!), and our neighbourhood is predominantly Russian. When I taught French Immersion there a few years ago, many of my six-year-olds were learning French as a third language (after Russian and English). If I start teaching in that neighbourhood again, I'd like to learn Russian - both so that I can connect with the parents a bit more, and so that I can understand kids who come in from recess sobbing, and don't yet have the English or French skills to explain to me what happened. So I may be peppering you with questions a year from now!

    (If I do learn Russian, it will probably be my last language. I don't think I have the time - or the stamina - to maintain more than two foreign languages while learning a third.)
  18. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I for one look forward to your questions :)

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