Russian Blog 2.4

Russian Blog 2.4

This week I have been working on a variety of tasks for my language learning process.  I have been delayed a bit in my plans to work on grammar in workbooks because they have not arrived in the mail yet.  I have simply found other things to turn my attention to however.

I have continued duolingo every day and I am now onto lessons on plurals and locations.  As it is with most languages, the words change based on tenses, genders and in singular or plural form.  This does make it a bit more confusing when trying to pronounce the words because you may grow familiar to it being said a specific way.  The only cure is repetition.

I have watched three of my Russian Disney movies and they are awesome.  The voice overs are a little weird at times but for the most part they sound normal.  I was also proud of myself to have noticed that sometimes the Cyrillic subtitles don't match up with what is being spoken.  This is likely due to the translate, translating directly from the subtitles rather than the film.  For instance, in the movie they may say goodbye as пока while in the subtitles it says до свидания.  It is essentially the same thing but still off if I was trying to follow the subtitles.  I was very happy to be able to make those distinctions.

I am also watching a really good Russian tv show called the нюхач. It is a detective show and it actually gives me good insight in to how actual people pronounce words and in what situations they are spoken.  For this show though, I use English subtitles and I find it amusing when the English is saying "Hello, how are you doing today," and in the show all they say is да.

I have also started working on counting.  While scary at first, you quickly realize that they follow a repeting pattern for numbers that most other languages do.  The numbers themselves also don't change so that makes my life a lot easier.

Hopefully my workbooks will come in so I can begin writing exercises but if not I will continue with my various methods.  I also found out that when I actually get an official host family that I will be given Pimsleur to use.  It is a program similar to Rosetta Stone but it focusses more on survival communication so that you know how to get around at least.