I've played around with the idea of learning Russian for a few years now but have never maintained my studies for more than a week before taking a break. I've had several starts and stops but now I feel like I'm ready to commit to it. I don't know if this will be possible, but I've set my goal at A2/B1 one year from today. I'll try to update this at least once per week. All questions, comments, encouragement and insults are welcome.
Here's what I'll be using for the next month or two: ПЕРВЫЕ ШАГИ (first steps) course at LingQ - 112 lessons covering basic vocabulary and structures. I'm on lesson 13 now. I'm going to try to finish it but will change if it gets too boring. Penguin and various other books and websites for grammar Michel Thomas advanced and vocabulary courses After that I should be ready for conversation.
No, a native speaker said that parts of it were very unnatural sounding so I stopped using it around lesson 10.
"It's déjà vu all over again" -Yogi Berra One of my problems with getting started in Russian has been that I haven't found any courses that I've liked. Now that I've gone through more of the LingQ lessons I'm already bored with this course and the painfully slow audio. I love LingQ and will use it for more advanced material when I'm ready for it but I don't like their beginner material. Of the courses I've tried, I liked Modern Russian the best. It has a lot of audio, both drills and dialogues. The dialogues are fast right from the beginning which I like. At the time I had two problems with it. First, since it is over 50 years old there is some outdated vocabulary. Second, they introduce some pretty low frequency vocabulary in the early lessons. I found out later that this course was used at a U.S. university so that is why the early lessons deal with enrolling in a university, living in a dorm, etc. instead of the usual tourist subjects. The first problem is easily solved now. I have a good Russian conversation partner so I think I will read each dialogue to him to work on my pronunciation and have him point out anything that sounds outdated. The second problem I'll just have to accept. I'm sure they'll teach all the common words eventually, just maybe not in the order that I feel like I should learn them. I don't have an immediate need to communicate in Russian so I will try to be patient and go through the course. By the end of it I should have all the vocabulary I need for basic conversation. So my updated plan is going to be to focus on Modern Russian. Almost all of my Russian conversations here deal with giving directions to lost Russian tourists so I can just do "Island building" with my conversation partner to learn what is most practical to me right now. If I'm going to make progress this time I really need to stick with one course and I feel like this is the one, but with my track record I'm not making any promises.
Hang in there! I think I must have started 15 language courses in Russian. Fortunately I have also finished a few. I do not really have time for studying, and I struggle reading in Russian (or at least I have struggled) so I depend on audio a lot. I started with Russian in my car, then Pimsleur 1-3, then Teach Yourself Russian Conversation and then Michel Thomas. I am half through Assimil, but I get bored. Pimsleur may strike you as extremely slow in the beginning, but if you do the first lessons while you jog, or cook or wash your car, so you do not feel that you waste time, you can always focus more on the latter lessons. It's expensive, but in the US you can probably get it in the library.
I've dabbled on Lingq in the Russian lessons, but they weren't too exciting. Are there any you recommend?
Not so interesting (what can we expect for beginners stuff?), but you can try the 26 lessons in Who is She? Then you'll be ready for the very good 100+ lessons in Русский Подкаст Finally, there are 50 good lessons in RussianLingQ There are handfuls of good additional lessons here and there, but those are the main ones. After who is she, I didn't want to do short lessons (less than 5 min) anymore, but there are tons of those.
OK, let me get all of the excuses out of the way: week-long Thai holiday where my wife's family came to visit, sold a condo and bought a new rental property, major problem with work that had me stressed out and took a long time to fix,... blah blah blah. All of that is true but I still could have found the time to study but didn't. That's the bad news. The good news is I've studied for about 3 hours in the last 2 days which about equals my total study time for the last 6 months.
"Who is She" is weird. "RussianLingQ" is too advanced. I also recommend "Русский Подкаст". There are some Putin's speeches uploaded lately. But they would be for intermediate to advanced learners. In general, I think LingQ works better for intermediate learners, but not beginners. It is better to go with traditional materials if you are starting from scratch. I personally went through Pimsleur 1-3 first, then jumped into LingQ.
Thanks for the feedback Oleg. I'm using Modern Russian and the Russia Today course which someone mentioned here. I'm hoping that after I finish them I'll be able to jump straight into Кухня using LingQ with the transcripts, but if it's still too hard then I'll do some of the Русский Подкаст first.
