Language Learning

I recently started slowly reading through the first Harry Potter book in German. Last night, I ran into this sentence:

Mr. Dursley summte vor sich hin und suchte sich für die Arbeit seine langweiligste Krawatte aus, und Mrs. Dursley schwatzte munter vor sich hin, während sie mit dem schreienden Dudley rangelte und ihn in seinen Hochstuhl zwängte.

When I first read the sentence, I wasn’t sure what the verbs hinsummen and hinschwatzen meant. I knew what summen and schwatzen both meant, but I wasn’t sure what the prefix hin- transformed them to.  I looked around in my dictionaries, but saw nothing of any use.

I then decided to ask a native German speaker, and posted the sentence, along with my questions about it, to a German language forum I frequent. Within half an hour, I had my answer: the verbs aren’t hinsummen and hinschwatzen. Instead, the hin in both parts of the sentence belongs with the phrase vor sich hin, which means something like “to one’s self” or “by myself.”

The point, then? Often, it’s easier and quicker to simply ask a native about something than it is to dig through dictionaries, grammars, and notes. Certainly, I’m not saying you should constantly badger your native speaking friends with questions, but they are a wonderful help in learning a language. They often instinctively know how something should be said, even if they’re not sure of the grammatical reasoning behind it. They can also quickly dissect a sentence for you, whereas if you were doing it by yourself, you could spend quite a while figuring out which “bits” of the sentence go together, like in my example above.

I just noticed that I have a new incoming link to this blog, coming from Frodo Lives!. Frodo Lives! appears to be a very new language learning blog (the first post is from the 28th of July!) It looks like it’s going to be a nice language blog, so do check it out. If for no other reason, the fellow deserves a visit solely for using such a wonderful title. Anyone who is a Tolkien lover is okay in my book.

As for myself, no, I’ve not fallen off the planet. I’m still studying my languages, but I’ve just had not much to really say about that study these past few days. Most of my studying has been relatively uneventful (but fulfilling) vocabulary grunt work. I learned the genitive endings for singular nouns in Russian a day or two ago, but I still can’t really make up my own sentences yet. Patience, patience, patience. That’s what I keep telling myself.

I’ve been trying some new methods to aid my language learning lately, and I thought I’d write a bit about one of the things I’m doing: talking. That may sound silly – foreign languages are to be spoken, of course you need to talk – but I actually don’t think think it’s silly. Why? Because despite every language student knowing that they need to speak the language*, many of them don’t speak the language, due to embarrassment, or a simple lack of opportunity to speak the language.

I fall under both of those categories. When I have had, in the past, the very occasional chance to speak one of my foreign languages with a native speaker, I have often clammed up, because I was embarrassed, knowing that I’d stutter, stumble over words, and generally look silly. Furthermore, living in a small town, I just don’t have access to many native speakers of German or Russian.

So, what am I to do? Apparently, the solution is to talk anyway: to myself. I’ve been doing this lately, and it’s helping, a lot. I believe I wrote about it here in the past, but as a refresher, when I first started learning German, I dealt solely with writing and reading. I made the stupid assumption that if I could write and read a language, those skills would transfer to speaking and listening. So, after a few years of German study, I found that while I could read fairly well and write decently, I could barely understand any spoken German, and could speak even less. The words simply refused to come out of my mouth.

I’m trying to keep this problem from ever appearing in my Russian. From the start, I’ve been forcing myself to speak. When all I had to work with was my New Penguin Russian Course book, I would read a dialogue outloud a few times, and then try to go through the dialogue without reading the text. Now that I have a ton of audio to work with, I’ll listen to a dialogue, shadowing the speech. After doing that some, I’ll try the dialogue on my own.

The end result, which is probably no surprise at all, is that I’m finding it much easier to speak Russian than I found it to speak German. Not only that, but I’m also finding it much easier to remember words now. The reason is, I think, fairly obvious, which makes me feel even more dumb for not making myself speak more often: by having an aural link to the word, as opposed to a solely visual one (written), my memory has more to pull on. Furthermore, in Russian, due to it being in the Cyrillic alphabet, I’m finding it easier to remember how a word sounds than it is to remember how it’s spelled. The fact that I’m forcing myself to get used to producing, orally, the peculiar sounds of Russian, certainly doesn’t hurt.

After doing this for a while and observing the results, I’m beginning to wonder if I have been wrong about my primary learning style. I’ve always thought that, being someone who loves to read and does so all the time, that I would be a dominantly visual learner. But the results I’m seeing from forcing myself to speak – to babble, even – are showing something else. Whether this means I’m primarily an auditory learner, or just that speech is inextricably bound to language learning, I don’t know.

Now that I’ve seen how much of a help it is to make myself really spit the language out, as opposed to just reading it and writing it, I’ve started doing the same things with German. In one of the phrasebooks I have, I’ll read a sentence until it’s in my short term memory, and then procede to saying the sentence without reading the text. If it’s something I can do, I’ll experiment with changing the word order, or even some of the words. I’m seeing the same kind of positive effects with my German as I did with Russian.

* There are exceptions to the rule of “needing to speak a foreign language.” Dead languages are the primary reason for this. No one speaks Latin anymore, nor Old Norse, nor Old English, so there really is no pressing need to be able to speak them. I’ve read in the past, however, that it is that very silence about the language, the inability to hear a great deal of the language, that makes learning dead languages so difficult. From what I’m seeing though from experimenting with forcing myself to speak, perhaps learning the pronunciation of a dead language and practicing speaking it may help you learn the language anyway, even if you have no intent of conversing in it.

A friend of mine emailed me today with a few personal updates. Also in the email was this:

Since you study Russian, I was wondering what actually attracts you to it and to the people and the country. I can imagine someone studying a language on a purely theoretical basis, but it makes more sense if you actually admire or like the culture behind the language. Just thought of this while watching the news actually: Putin, Yeltsin, the protests, the riots in Estonia… It’s all very fascinating.

He also mentioned that the answer to that could prove to be an interesting blog post, and I agree, so here we are.

While I’d love to say that I have a solid reason for wanting to learn Russian – admiration of their culture, preference towards a communist state, plans of visiting Russia in the future – I’d be lying if I said I had such a reason. I began studying Russian right around the beginning of 2007, when I received a copy of The New Penguin Russian Course as an early Christmas gift. That doesn’t really help much in regards to why I started studying the language, though, because I specifically asked for that book as a gift. Now that I try to think back and remember of any particular thing that said “learn Russian!” to me, I’m coming with a bank.

I suppose it’s just a variety of things that led to my studying it. For one, I’m just a language geek in general, and enjoy learning languages. I’ve been studying German for about 4 years now, and felt that it was time that I try to add a second foreign language into the mix. I know one influencing factor was my interest in World War 2. Due to the Russians playing such a large role in the war, I was interested in learning more about them in general (because I knew next to nothing about them). I guess this desire to learn more about Russia and its peoples simply bled off into the language department. When I decided to learn Russian, it wasn’t a thought out, planned course of action, but more of a “hey, what the hell, why not?” thing.

While I hadn’t thought of this reason specifically, I’m glad I selected Russian. As I progress in my study of it, I’m finding that I enjoy the language, particularly how it sounds. I’m also glad that it’s a Slavic language, because by learning it, I’ll have given myself a good base to learn other Slavic languages, if I were so inclined. I don’t know how knowing it will help me professionally, or if it will at all, but I can’t help but think that knowing even the basics of a fairly difficult language will help me at some point, somehow.

When I get a decent base down for my Russian, I’ll probably start working on Spanish. For that language, I do have a reason: it’s practical for where I live. Spanish is the most often spoken foreign language in the U.S., and I’d say knowing some of it would help me career wise. If nothing else, it would let me communicate with all of the Mexicans who have appeared in my town during the past 5 years or so.

So, to give a short answer to my friend’s question: no particular reason. I just kind of decided to learn Russian. (Regarding politics though, communism doesn’t look too bad, on paper, anyway. It’s never actually worked like the theory prescribes, though, so we have no historical example to judge.)

[This post was originally posted on my personal blog System13.org.]

Not a problem!

I don’t know what the deal is, but all of the Princeton material for their Russian courses is available from their site for free. For each lesson, there is a PDF file with a dialogue, vocabulary, and grammar explanations. Also for each lesson, there are MP3 files with the dialogues performed by native speakers.

In the folder for Slavic 101, it appears there’s 84 lessons, within 12 chapters. There is also a story in Russian, which apparently is worked on throughout the course. It comes complete with grammar and vocabulary information.

For Slavic 105, it looks like there are around 120 lessons.

I’m not sure what Slavic 207 is about. There aren’t any PDF files, just MP3s, many of which are Russian music. Perhaps 207 is a Slavic culture class, and it is assumed that the student will already know Russian to a fair extent.

All in all, the coursework available comes to around 2 gigabytes. If you’d like to download it, you can use HTTrack Website Copier to copy all of it to your hard drive, while retaining the folder structure. That way you won’t have to spend the next 3 weeks of your life clicking back and forth in Firefox, saving one file at a time.

Oh, by the way. Did you really think I’d write all of this out and then not give you the link to the coursework? If you thought no, you’re right. Here’s your link.

I just wanted to post a quick note here to let regular readers* of Language Geek know that I have not abandoned the blog. University classes started April 2nd for me, and since then, while I have had some time for language study, I haven’t had time for language study and language blogging. I’m getting more accustomed to my class schedule and the associated work, and hopefully, my language geekery will be picking up again soon.

* Yes, regular readers still exist for Language Geek; at least, that’s what my blog stats tell me. Those of you who have hung in there during this long silence, I appreciate your patience! Thanks!

I was just poking around online, looking for some Russian language podcasts, when I remembered A Spoonful of Russian. I had checked out the podcast probably a year ago, but never really went anywhere with it. Now that I’m learning Russian, it’s nice to have remembered the site.

Natalia, the maker of the podcast, has added a few new things to her offerings, namely video lessons showing how to write the Russian (Cyrillic) letters in cursive. She hasn’t quite finished the entire alphabet just yet, but has a large amount of it completed. Here are links to the videos and the letters which each video contains:

• Lesson 15 (Letter “A”)
• Lesson 16 (Letters “Б,Ð’,Г”)
• Lesson 17 (Letters “Д,Е,Ё,Ж”)
• Lesson 18 (Letters “З,И”)
• Lesson 19 (Letters “Й,К,Л,Ðœ,Н”)
• Lesson 20 (Letters “О,П,Р,С,Т”)
• Lesson 21 (Letters “У,Ф,Ð¥,Ц,Ч”)

The only letters which she needs to cover at this point are Ш, Щ, Ь, Ы, Ъ, Э, Ю, and Я.

There are also a lot of other handy resources at A Spoonful of Russian. There’s this MP3 file of Natalia going through the Russian alphabet (i.e., what the letters are called – the KGB is NOT pronounced “Kay Jee Bee”!) To make things simpler (and to save myself a bit of work), I’ll just point you to Natalia’s download page to get to the rest of the goodies. At that link, you’ll find dialogues from the podcasts, songs, lyrics, a cursive writing workbook that you can download… lots and lots of free goodies. As an added bonus, Natalia clearly knows how to record things well – all of the audio has excellent sound quality, with little to no background noise.

I read about Stuart Jay Raj the other day at the Tower of Confusion. Here is the original post about the fellow in question, Stuart Jay Raj. Stuart can read, write, and speak in more than 15 languages. The YouTube videos, which are all availabe here on Stuart’s blog, are extremely interesting. It’s all in Thai subtitles (barring the sections where Stuart demonstrates his ability in other languages), but it’s well worth the reading of the subtitles.

One thing that blew me away about the interview is that he said that when he starts learning a new language, he’ll spend the first week or so just reading a dictionary, picking up 3,000-5,000 words to work with. He mentioned that he uses a lot of mnemonics to link works to things outside of language, which surely helps, but still – 5,000 words in a week? If that’s really the case, that’s simply amazing.

I mentioned this at the Tower of Confusion in the comments, but I did find something a bit ironic. He had a chart showing what languages he knew, and his proficiency in the specific languages in the sections of reading, writing, and speaking. For English, he gave himself “5″ on all of the sections (5 being the highest, on a scale of 1 to 5). The irony? On his blog, at the top of the page, is this:

Whether your into Thai, Lao, Cambodian,…

You need you’re right there, Stuart, not your. Oh well. Everyone makes mistakes!

As an aside, it’s a pity that Stuart doesn’t blog that often. He’s only written one post during all of 2007, and that’s the post with the YouTube videos. Considering his knowledge of languages and his skill at learning them, I’m sure a regularly updated blog from him would be outstanding.

I set aside an hour this evening to work on my Russian with the book I’m using, The New Penguin Russian Course. I went through chapter 4 a second time, this time taking notes of things that seemed particularly important, like the present tense conjugations of verbs. I’m nearing the point where I’m “done” with this chapter; whenever I reach that point, I’ll roll on over to chapter 5. Things that I still need to do in chapter 4:

• Memorize all of the conjugation patterns. I’m pretty confident with the conjugations of Type 1 verbs; Type 2, not so much.
• Do the exercises. My brain was feeling a bit resistant to chugging along any further when I reached the exercises a little bit ago, so I’m saving those for tomorrow.
• Memorizing the vocabulary. This is the one that I know is going to be the most time consuming.

As I work through the beginning chapters of this book, I’m really beginning to see what the author meant when he said that, while Russian grammar can seem like an awful lot to English speaker, ultimately, the real hurdle is the vocabulary. While there are words in Russian that were taken from English, and which sound similar, there are a lot of words (probably the majority of the words, but I’m not sure about this) that have absolutely nothing in similar to the English counterpart. After having studied German for so long, I’m used to many the words being similar: lernen / learn, denken / think, schießen / shoot (a gun, etc.).

On the flip side, the Russian word provided in my book for “to study” is изучать, which is pronounced roughly: eez-ooch-at(y). Do you see any similarities between that word and “study”? Yeah, me neither. I’d say that as I learn more Russian words, as well as become more familiar with sound patterns in the language, picking up vocabulary will become easier (but probably never easy).

I can happily say, on the other hand, that I’m becoming fairly proficient at writing Russian (i.e., the Cyrillic handwriting that Russians use). I have to pause and think briefly when it comes to a few letters (like ц, for example), but mostly, I can look at Russian text and write it down with little fuss. The only mistake that I find myself making is that I’ll occasionally write a lowercase “t” for the t sound, when in fact, in Russian handwriting, the letter that is used for the t sound is an “m.” I think such a mistake can be understood; I’ve been writing lowercase “t” for the t sound for.. oh, 16 or 17 years.

Well, I feel rather dumb now…

I’ve been listening to podcasts from Deutsche Welle for a while now. They offer quite a few, and some of them are made specifically for learners of German. A couple that I’ve listened to for quite a while via iTunes is “Alltagsdeutsch” and “Sprachbar.”

The podcasts have a transcript of the entire show in the Description area in iTunes, or they’re supposed to anyway. Due to the amount of text that Deutsche Welle tries to get into the field, it always gets cut off by quite a bit. Furthermore, I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to read a transcript for a 20 minute long podcast on the iPod’s tiny screen, but it isn’t particularly enjoyable.

Of course, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d snooped around on their website some more. Apparently, they have pages for all of their podcasts. Guess what’s on all of those pages? Yep – transcripts of all of the podcasts, in nice, large text, far more readable than the iPod screen.

Here is the page for Alltagsdeutsch, and here is the page for Sprachbar. Here is the main page for their podcasts, if you want to browse around for others.

I was out running some errands earlier today, when the phrase “broad daylight” popped into my head. The more I thought about it, the more it irked me. It had never really occurred to me before, but it’s more of an idiom than a phrase that makes logical sense. Example sentence:

“Surely a thief would never try to mug someone in broad daylight.”

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a fairly simple definition of the word broad, which is typically (but not always) used as an adjective:

1. a. Extended in the direction measured from side to side; wide. Opposed to narrow.

So, if we have broad daylight, does that mean one can have narrow daylight, as well? What about daylight is broad? What about it could be narrow? The only thing I can think of that could be broad is the distance one could see, based on how bright (or dark) it is outside. But daylight itself being broad? I don’t get that at all. Even with the example of the distance one could see to, it really should be “how far” one can see, not how “wide” one can see. So even there, “broad daylight” doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

I’ve been working on my Russian some more. In particular, I’ve been trying to work on the vocabulary, since vocabulary has always been my weak spot, regardless of the language. I’m running into a problem: when I think of a word, I’m thinking of how it would be transliterated into English, not how it’s spelled in Russian. When I think of the word англичанкa, for example, instead of thinking of it with that spelling, what pops into my head is instead: an-glee-chanka, which is how it’s pronounced.

I’m not quite sure how to remedy this problem. I’ve been thinking via the English language, and thus, the Roman alphabet, for my whole life. I’m not sure how to tell my brain that, while speaking Russian or thinking in Russian, it needs to roll over to Cyrillic. I’m going to try writing more Russian to see if that helps.

Any suggestions?

I was just checking out a German language forum, looking at one of the word games there, when I saw this word:

die Niederschlagswahrscheinlichkeit

This translates as “chance of precipitation”, basically. When I saw it, I immediately was reminded of The Awful German Language by Mark Twain. Snippet:

• Freundschaftsbezeigungen.
• Dilettantenaufdringlichkeiten.
• Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.

These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page — and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:

• Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
• Alterthumswissenschaften.
• Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.
• Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.
• Wiedererstellungbestrebungen.
• Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.

Alphabetical processions, indeed! Are there any extremely long words in your foreign language of choice that have caught your attention?

I don’t have a great deal to report on, but I wanted to post an update here so that the blog didn’t fall into disrepair again. I’ve been working on Russian some more. In the past week I’ve:

1. Dipped back to chapter 2 in my Russian book, as planned, and started learning how to write the Cyrillic characters. Far from finished on this one, but making progress.
2. Listened to lesson 6 of Pimsleur’s Russian 1 one final time.
3. Listened to lesson 7 of the same course once. I’d say one or two more hearings will prepare me for lesson 8. I’m having trouble figuring out how they’re saying “to have lunch”. It sounds something like “pa byedet”. However, a brief check at Rambler.ru shows that “to have lunch” is обедать. Either Pimsleur is using something a bit different, or my hearing is horrible… I guess I really do need to listen to it a few more times!

I’ve also been working on my German. I’ve been able to talk to my German buddy Marcel a bit in the past few days, which is always good practice. I’ve also been visiting the German forums at about.com more frequently, taking part in the word games and posting in other threads (in German, of course). Today I listened to a bit of audio from the movie Der Untergang; I was going to listen to a German podcast, but when I selected the podcast menu on my iPod, it showed no podcasts at all. I guess something went bonkers during the syncing last night; I suppose a resync should fix things up. I’ve been trying to read a bit from 750 German Verbs and Their Uses every day as well.

I suppose a shorter version of this post would be: things going well, working on German and Russian, further updates to follow.

Well, today was the first day I returned to my Russian language book, The New Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas J. Brown. As I said I would, I sat down this evening for a solid study session, which ended up coming in at around 45 minutes. During that time I worked my way through all of Chapter 4. It wasn’t a thorough work through, to be sure, more of a “reading for the first time to become acquainted” deal. Nevertheless, I’m now starting to get familiar with the present tense conjugation of the three main types of verbs. I was also briefly introduced to the inflected nature of Russian, which wasn’t that bad at all, after working with German for so long.

I’m getting better at reading Cyrillic, and pretty quick, too. I was honestly surprised that I picked the alphabet back up so quickly after such a long break. While I still have to think briefly about some of the letters, mostly the sounds just pop into my head when I look at the corresponding letters.

However, I am having some difficulty in getting my mouth to produce some of the sounds in a chain, thus producing a word that a Russian might (hopefully) understand. Particularly when reading new words out loud, my pace is stumbling at best. But that’s okay: practice makes perfect!

Since writing my “back to languages!” post, I’ve relistened to two lessons of Pimsleur’s Russian 1. I listened to lessons 5 and 6 again because that’s where I trailed off previously. I was surprised here as well: for the most part, I remembered everything from them. I think later this evening I’ll have a go at lesson 7.

Fairly soon I need to dip back into my book to chapter 2, which explains how to write in the Russian script. Russians don’t write their language the same way its printed in books, newspapers, and on the web. While some of the written letters are quite similar to the printed time, some of them are a bit different. You can see what I mean by taking a look at this picture. If you’re learning to write in Russian script, you might want to check out this page, which has animated GIFs of how all the letters are written.

Forrest commented on my post about typing in Cyrillic, pointing the way to a great site, Lexilogos: Clavier Multilingue. For those who don’t speak French*, Clavier Multilingue is simply “multilingual keyboard.” The site lets you choose from a huge number of languages. When you choose one, you’re taken to a page like this, with a text box. Below it is a set of buttons with all of the characters needed for the language you chose. Above each button is the letter on your keyboard that you need to type to produce the button below it. That sounds complicated, but it’s not; see for yourself. To type in Russian, I basically just sound out how the Russian word sounds, and type it with my own keys. “D” produces “д”, “Z” produces “з”, etc.

As an English speaker, I don’t have some of the “standard” keys on my keyboard, such as Å¡ and č, but that’s not a huge deal. All I have to do is click the correspond buttons and the letters appear in the box.

Quite a cool website; I don’t want to use it indefinitely for typing in Cyrillic, but until I memorize what keys produce what Cyrillic letters, it’ll serve as a great stepping stone.

Thanks, Forrest!

As an English speaker, a few of the letters used to produce “foreign” ones, I don’t have on my keyboard, such as ž, Å¡, and č.

* I don’t speak French either, truth be told. Google Translate did the work for me this time around.

On my last post, Geoff posted a wonderful comment. Here’s a snippet from it:

And frankly, the personal notes about the more mundane aspects of language learning and dealing with its frustrations often provide more benefit, for the comfort they offer, than somebody’s neat new trick that’s a little too much like something from the omniscient language learning site.

This remark about “neat new tricks” really struck me. Why? Because for a long time, a large part of my language learning time was taken up (wasted, truthfully) looking for “tips and tricks” on how to learn a language, instead of actually working on learning the language itself. What was the best way to learn grammar? Vocabularly? Are there any tricks for doing it faster? Should I use flashcards or another method? Where should I get content to study? How may words do I need to know? So on and so forth.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with asking these questions, and even seeking out some answers for them. But one needs to realize quickly that you should ask these questions, get a decent idea of how to learn a language, and then get down to learning it. Because ultimately, there is no super trick, other than this: time. To learn a foreign language well, you have to put in time with it, and a lot of time.

Learning a foreign language can be likened to losing weight by exercising. You can know all of the concepts about a number of really great exercises – sit ups, push-ups, chin lifts – but when you get down to it, knowing about the exercises won’t make you lose weight. You have to spend time doing them to get the effects you want. Language is the same way; to learn one, you have to put your time in. Knowing all of the tricks in the world won’t help if you don’t spend time with your target language.

It has just been neglected by its horrible owner, me. There is a simple but disheartening reason for this: the past month has been, for the most part, rather lacking in language study. I’d come up with some wonderful excuse, like a death in the family, or perhaps my contraction of some strange and uncomfortable disease, but I have no such excuse. The nasty truth is, I just got out of the habit. I’ve not listened to many podcasts, in German or Russian; I’ve barely even looked at any foreign language websites; and, I must admit, I haven’t even opened my book on Russian… at all. Other things just kind of crept into my life and knocked language learning out of the way. I’m not happy about it in the least.

I’ve decided to remedy this problem, and get my butt back on track, both with German and Russian. I suppose this post is part of my “getting back on track.” This blog was created to be part learning resource, part language learning journal for myself, and I guess it’s only fair that I note when I’m studying, and also when I’m not studying.

I think that part of the reason I fell off the wagon is that I’ve been pretty slack about a time for my studying. I’ve never really said, “Alright, I’m going to study German for one hour at 6PM everyday”, or any such thing. My study times have always been haphazard to say the least. Of course, having a toddler makes it difficult to say such things and truly be able to stick to them, but I’d be lying to myself if I said I couldn’t work out some kind of schedule. My university courses start up again in about a month, which will alter things a bit more, but I think I’m going to try and sit down for at least half an hour everyday at say, 7PM, to do some studying. If I can get more tidbits of time in throughout the day, great, but a regular half an hour is better than no studying at all.

I’ve been trying to get a decent system going for my vocabulary learning over the past few days. I’m going with a flashcard system, based on the Leitner system. I think flashcards are effective when you’re disciplined about using them (which I haven’t been in the past, much to my annoyance). I’m running into a tricky problem though, one which I hope to get some feedback on.

The problem revolves around words that, when translated, can have a wide range of meanings. I don’t mean different shades of meaning, such as with the German word umfassend: it can come across as thorough, comprehensive, encompassing and quite a few others. However, when you get down to it, the words are all expressing a similar concept. Instead, I’m talking about words that have blatantly different meanings attached to them. The example that brought up this issue for me was this word from the Word of the Day piece at About German. Here’s the entry:

die Vertretung (-en)  replacement, substitute (teacher), deputy; representation (of firm, agency, etc.); agency, office

So, this single word can be a replacement, a substitue teacher, or a deputy; it can also be representation of a firm or agency, or, it can express not the representation of a firm or agency, but an agency or office! The issue, of course, is this: what do I learn? All of it? A substitute teacher is quite a bit different from an agency or office (and even a deputy is quite a bit different from a substitute!) If I opt to learn all of the meanings in one go (as opposed to learning the different meanings as I come in contact with them in reading or conversation), do I make a separate flashcard for each meaning, or do I make one flashcard for die Vertretung and attach all of the English meanings? That sounds like a path for disaster, I think.

What’s your take? How do you handle this problem?

Tonight I worked on some Russian, which I hadn’t done in a few days. I studied my book for about 45 minutes, going over some tricky pronunciation material in Chapter 2, then started on Chapter 3 again. I’m refusing to move on until I’ve mastered each part, including all of the sections in the book marked EXTRA.

I wanted to make some flashcards on my computer, so I had to figure out how to type in Cyrillic. Setting Windows XP up to use Cyrillic really is a breeze. To set it up:

1. Click Start -> Control Panel.
2. On the Control Panel page, select Regional and Language Options.
3. Click on the Languages tab at the top of the screen.
4. Click Details.
5. Click Add. Under the drop down for Input Language, select Russian.

That’s it! To use the Cyrillic script, open the program you’re going to be writing in, then look on your taskbar. Off to the right (by default), you’ll see a little button that looks like a keyboard. Click on it, and you’ll be able to select any of the input languages you’ve entered, including the newly added Russian.

That’s the easy part. The tricky part is remembering what English key represents what Cyrillic letter. It took me about 15 minutes to make seven flashcards in my flashcard program of choice, Pauker. I printed out a picture of the standard Cyrillic keyboard layout that Windows XP uses. Here’s the picture of the keyboard layout. In a very literal way, I was (and still am) learning how to type, again. It’s a rather peculiar feeling. With English, I can type 85-90 words per minute with very, very few mistakes. Making my Russian flashcards threw me back into the days of hunting and pecking. I didn’t much care for the feeling. To make my learning of the Cyrillic keyboard layout a little less painful, I’m probably going to order some Russian stickers. A set comes in at around $15.

Since starting on Russian a few weeks ago, I’ve been attacking it on two different fronts: book-wise, I’m using The New Penguin Russian Course. For listening and speaking, I’m using Pimsleur’s Comprehensive Russian 1 course.

As I expected, my progress with Russian is going much slower than my progress with German was when I first started with it. English and German are both Germanic languages, and there are a lot of similarities. Russian, on the other hand, is a Slavic language, and has (at least as far as I can tell at this point) very little in common with English. There are some cognate words here and there, once you pronounce them, but they obviously look nothing like their English or German counterparts; they’re in Cyrillic!

In my book, I was quite happy to read this on page 27:

If you know about gender from studying French and German, you will be glad to know that the gender of Russian nouns is much easier to learn since you can nearly always tell the gender from the ending.

While it’s easy to discern the gender of many German nouns, particularly based on their endings (-heit, -keit, etc.), many others are not so easy discernible. To find out that the system of noun gender in Russian is far more simple makes me a happy language geek.

My listening and speaking skills are moving along nicely. I have progressed up to Lesson 6 of the Pimsleur Russian 1 course. I’ve been doing each lesson 3-5 times before moving on. It doesn’t take that many times to grasp 80% of the material (which is what Pimsleur recommends before moving on to the next lesson), but I’m really trying to master the entire lesson before I move on. I’m doing lessons until I don’t have to think about a response, or how to say something. When it pops out of my mouth with very little thinking on my part, I consider it “mastered” material.

Some of the sounds were a bit confusing to me at first, particularly until I read the pronunciation guide in my book. One of the aspects of it that really gave me trouble was the soft sound, i.e. consonants with y blended into them. The pronunciation for the phrase that means “good day” is like this:

do-bri dye[ny]

When I heard this pronounced in Pimsleur, it sounded like they were saying:

do-bri jing

Now that I know about the soft sound (y), it’s gotten quite a bit easier to make out how to pronounce things.

Russian is the first language that I’ve tackled like this right from the start. With German, I started out (and continued for a LONG TIME) solely with written learning materials. After doing Russian like this for a few weeks, I must say, it’s exponentially better than just doing written material. I don’t like the idea of solely audio (i.e., Pimsleur on its own), but I also don’t like the idea of solely written. While the explanations in the book are quite good, I know that I wouldn’t have my pronunciation right based just on my text. Mixing the book and Pimsleur is a great blend.

Hello, and welcome to Language Geek, a new blog I just started. Another blog is just what I need. It’s not like I already run two different blogs. This blog will be similar to Aspiring Polyglot: a journal of my language learning experiences. That was initially the plan with my Learning German blog, but it won’t cover it now; I received an early Christmas gift about a week ago, The New Penguin Russian Course, and have started working through it. So, with the addition of a language to my daily line-up, I decided to create a blog about my general language experiences, instead of just German. I’m going to continue running Learning German, but I’m not quite sure what will be going there now, beside the Word of the Day entries.

For those who like a bit of personal information, my name’s Josh and I’m 22 years old. I’m a full time university student; I am, however, off right now for winter break. I live in southern Ohio in a small (very small) city, which makes finding people to practice my languages with difficult, to say the least.