Here's my revelation for the week... learning a language takes time.... I know it sounds so simple, but it is still something I am having to come to terms with. I like to rush things and leave them to the last minute. You can't do that with language learning and it's for me to get used to! Right now, I'm seeing absolutely no progress in my Russian. I can't seem to figure out how things fit together and am basically just learning a few simple greetings and phrases and it's getting me down and making me reconsider why I'm doing such a hard language and not something a little easier like French or Spanish. Then I had a little think about it, I have only been seriously working on Russian for a few weeks. Is that really enough time to have acquainted myself with the language? God no! I can't find the forum post but I vaguely remember it saying that it takes a good 100 hours to get fully acquainted with a language.. and here I am upset that I'm not able to construct sentences and speak after a few weeks! Reality check!
Another thing that I'm having trouble with is learning vocabulary. Should I be learning the dictionary form of words (i.e masc. nom.) or should I learn the form that is in the text I'm reading and not bother thinking about case, gender ect? In Russian I've found that every word changes ALL THE TIME and it really just confuses me :S. I might just try finding the dictionary form and figuring out why the word in the text has changed... maybe it's being too pedantic but I will find out :D
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Just a suggestion Nathan: try less reading and more listening. Learn to repeat the phrases you hear. Don't worry about case endings: Russian kids don't get them right till they've been speaking Russian for about 10 years. Apparently. After 3 years I get them right sometimes.
ReplyDelete>> Russian kids don't get them right till they've been speaking Russian for about 10 years.
ReplyDeleteI totally disagree with you. Russian kids speak absolutely correctly. They sometimes invent new words, that actually do not exist in Russian language - but these words are absolutely correct grammatically. You can read Chukovsky's book of children's sayings, unfortunately I forgot its title... :(
hello (: yeah I do agree with you. Taking up a new language is a really huge commitment and you have to spend alot of time working on it if you really want to make progress. I've been learning korean for 1.5 years already and I still find that I barely scraped the surface. But I really enjoy the sense of sastisfaction when i look back at my progress and realised how much I've accomplished ^^
ReplyDelete