Comments on: A progress update on my Russian

By: Josh

Josh — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 21:05:08 +0000

Geoff: Thanks for the advice. Good idea.

By: GeoffB

GeoffB — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:41:24 +0000

The reason you don’t fall off your bike once you’ve learned to ride is that you know how to ride as a process, not as information. If you put your Russian vocabulary into sentences, practicing your 3rd person conjugations in the process (!), and then familiarize yourself with the sentences you’ve created, you’ll make something you use - active - instead of something you know - not so active. If you teach yourself sentences like “the cat eats the table,” you’ll have the nominative for cat, the 3rd person for eat and the accusative for table, all built into an image that will bring back the paradigms for you when you need them with a minimum of thought.

By: Nils

Nils — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 11:47:07 +0000

Ha! That’s a long story, which in short goes: I took it first year of secondary school and then tried brushing up my Sophocles a decade or so ago with a Teach Yourself book. In both cases I never got very far; at least, I wouldn’t be able to understand much today.

By: Josh

Josh — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:10:31 +0000

I didn’t know you had studied ancient Greek. Was that for schooling, or just an interest of yours?

By: Nils

Nils — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:00:22 +0000

I can distinguish most Cyrillic characters in their capitalized form, and have no trouble with such ‘classic tricky bits’ such as how CCCP was not pronounced as see-see-see-pee. LOL. Perhaps a remnant of studying ancient Greek. But it is with the regular, lowercase form that I get entirely confused. Not speaking a single word may also be a handicap there