learn Russian

Today I submitted the final essay for my second Russian course. It was one full page of text, in which I told about myself, my hobbies and my family members. Regardless of what the teacher says about it, I’m quite satisfied with it and I can say that I now know the basics of Russian.

I still cannot speak Russian very well, nor do I understand it when spoken at a normal tempo, but it’s a start. I’m definitely going to continue studying Russian in the autumn. :-)

but the textbook we have is not supporting me much, because the grammatical explanations in English are just barely understandable at best and completely incomprehensible most of the time. Furthermore, there are no vocabularies attached to the chapters, which means that I’m supposed to complete sentences with words, the meanings of which I do not know.

But I’m not going to give up! Today I started writing my own vocabulary. I write down all the unknown words in an excel sheet and look up the translations in a dictionary. It’s really slow and tedious but at least it should help me learn the language.

Monday’s lessons were very good. I learned a lot about prepositions and declination and I even got some praise from the teacher! :-D

That was quite a relief. I have been a bit worried because I’ve felt like I haven’t worked hard enough for my Russian course. I haven’t done much homework lately and I’ve also skipped some lessons. However now I’m feeling better again and perhaps I will learn Russian after all. :-)

I definitely need to dedicate more of my free time for studying Russian, because I feel like I haven’t understood the stuff we have gone through during the last couple of weeks well enough. I also believe I could actually be able to use my Russian skills after this course if I just study well enough. I mean the first beginners’ course was just preparation for the real stuff, and now we are going through the important stuff.

I passed the first basic course of Russian. :-)

Now I have already started with the second course and if I pass that one too, I shall mark this goal done. Then I will have to think really hard whether I will continue studying Russian or not, because I’d also love to learn some Spanish and I should try to keep up my German and improve my Swedish as well.

Today I had the last four lessons of the first beginners course and the final thing we did was conjugation of verbs. It was quite complicated and there were many rules to memorize and plenty of exceptions to watch out for but it didn’t feel like completely impossible to learn. However, I’m still glad it’s not part of the exam, which I will have on next Thursday. :-D

I will definitely take the second course for beginners as well. So far I am not able to say much in Russian, but I’ve learnt some of the basics, which are preconditions for further learning. Actually I kind of feel like that this whole course has been just preparation for the real stuff, and I’m quite sure that after the second course I will be able to say a whole lot of things. :-)

This week I learned how to say the numbers from 0 to 199. I can also say simple things like “my name is…”, “what is your name?” and “I have…”. I’m actually surprised how fast it really is to learn the necessities of very basic small talk. With a couple of verbs and the basic conjugation rules I would be able to say quite a bit more!

A couple of weeks ago we had a vocabulary exam and on Monday we got the results. I got 142 words correct, which is quite good in my opinion, considering that I started learning Russian in mid-October. :-)

I started working on this about three weeks ago and now I know the alphabet, some words and something about the pronunciation. That doesn’t sound like much but I think I’m doing quite well. At least I still have motivation to learn more and that’s what really matters. :-)

I had the first lecture today and I’m feeling really positive about this. :-)