Learn to speak Russian

I switched to listening to my tapes today. It was perhaps a little soon. The tapes really don’t leave a long enough pause for one to repeat the word, especially words/phrases that have a great deal of syllables. You are not even halfway through repeating when it is already saying the next thing. Although it was nice to hear some of the more basic words that I’ve been writing out aloud, once it got into ‘on Monday’ and ‘twenty thousand rubles’ I was completely unable to follow because I wasn’t even hearing half the words. It may be that I need a different tape, but the only other one I know of is Pimsleur, which I refuse to buy. I shall return to my snail-paced book learning before going back to the speakers on the tape, who are apparently in a hurry to get somewhere.

GOD!! I’ve been dedicating an hour a day to my Russian, and I’m still only on chapter one of my grammar workbook because I’m having trouble grasping the little finesses just with the alphabet and pronunciation. All the rules of hard and soft consonants and voiced and voiceless consonants, and the letters that are pronounced in different ways when stressed and not stressed. Ahh. I keep quietly screaming, “BUT WHY?” while I’m trying to do my exercises and discovering something I’ve filled out is entirely wrong. I refuse to move on until I really understand what’s happening. I shudder to think what’s going to happen when I am faced with the noun cases.

I’m concentrating on just learning the Cyrillic alphabet right now before learning how to read/write it handwritten in script, but I’d just like to complain about how difficult it is to write д as a block letter.

I am WELL ON MY WAY!

I love Russia. I would really like to go there one day, but I’m not even going to consider that unless I know how to speak and write the language at least passably. If I could, I would enroll in my local community college for only a class in Russian. Whenever I look at their semester classes, though, they are never offering it, despite the fact that the class exists. Probably this means that no one is taking Russian.

I tried to teach myself German when I was little, and that didn’t turn out very well. I’m not entirely sure how I intend to teach myself a language now, and a language that uses a completely different alphabet at that. I don’t even have any books on the Russian language. I would like some, but the most comprehensive one seems to cost quite a bit of money.