Getting to know Russian

I’ve been flirting with an idea to start learning Russian. A few weeks ago, my supportive girlfriend gave me a starting kick by giving me a teach-yourself-basic-business-Russian book, Lestnitsa.

Since I really want to learn at least the basics, not just learn overeagerly for a while and then get bored, I decided to gradually ease into it. Today I read the preface describing the purpose and style of the book. It seems to be split up into 8 “days”, providing the right dosage of new information for each session.

One thing caught my attention. In general, the book suggests you should listen to the provided audio recordings of dialogs and pronounce the words, while reading literal translations of them, regardless of whether you actually understand them yet. Considering the way I learned most languages, I can see the appeal behind this approach – I always taught myself mostly by reading or listening; my native language as well as foreign ones. That would be the reason I can often use the correct language construct when needed, but am hard pressed to name the exact rule specifying *why *it is correct. I also suspect this is the reason I suck at German – I simply haven’t had enough contact with it to know all the combinations of declension cases and grammatical genders by heart. Therefore all my sentences, regardless of the complexity of used vocabulary, sound like “I is potato. Is happy speaks German.”

German declension classes, something I’ll probably never fully master.

When someone asks me for advice when learning languages [English, most often], I always suggest the same thing: find stuff you like to do, and do it in that language. Read books, watch movies [subtitled if necessary], browse the ‘net, play games. Ignore the fact you don’t understand all that much – that will come later. So I liked the idea Ljestnitsa was proposing. There’s just one minor catch: English isn’t my native language.

Even though I’m more than eager to try, and I think I can process the basic words pretty quickly without translating them, I still have to wonder whether I’ll be making one more mental transition than necessary, which could potentially slow me down and kill the whole point of the method.

Another thing is, this might still be irrelevant. Since I already speak two languages from the Slavic family [where Russian also belongs] actively, and know some basic bits and pieces of other two, many of the words will probably be intuitively obvious to me. But then, I never really actively *learned *any of them, it just sorta came to me on vacations, through books and silly YouTube videos. Right now, before I even start, I suspect three kinds of problems might arise.

The genders. Many languages have them, English doesn’t. They’re assigned to all object, living or inanimate, and quite often you just have to memorize them for every word. But what if you’re speaking two similar languages with synonymic words which have *different *genders in their respective languages? As an illustration of this principle, take for example the word “crocodile”. In German, it’s “[das] Krokodil” – an “it”, neuter. In Slovak and Czech, it’s “krokodíl” – a “he”, masculine. Although the article often isn’t explicitly stated in Slavic languages, they still effect the declension, and thus the rest of the sentence. I’m not sure how many discrepancies are between my beloved Slovak and Russian, but if there are any, getting it wrong seems all too easy.

I don’t even know how many declension cases there are in Russian. I suspect that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and it will be similar to other languages in the family, so I’m crossing my fingers here and hoping I won’t have too much new stuff to learn.
- And, of course, pronunciation.

So I’ll give it a go and see.